Copyright assignment
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Sander_Marechal Nov 03, 2010 6:07 PM EDT |
Nope, the article author is wrong. Oracle/OOo requires copyright assignment. If the don't do that, they can't sell StarOffice. LO doesn't require that. Between LO and OOo code will only be flowing in one direction: from OOo to LO, not the other way around. Unless Oracle is prepared to give up the OOo copyright assignment requirement (which means giving up StarOffice). |
| Ridcully Nov 03, 2010 6:30 PM EDT |
I sincerely hope Sander_Marechal is correct because my knowledge of the area he is describing is fairly weak. However, I intensely dislike the thought of Oracle "cherry picking" under the circumstances that have produced the Document Foundation whether such cherry picking is legal or not ~ and this is where my ethics takes the driving wheel and practical pragmatism gets put into the passenger's seat. I also find Brian Proffitt's hypothesis a little too Machiavellian for my taste. Mind you, it "might be right", but I tend to think not. In any event, I should have thought that all the necessary "flow" from OO to LO would by now have taken place because LO is well into full development for the next version and from now on, LO takes its own very independent path. Is it possible for LO to diverge so much that OO could only take code from LO back into itself with some difficulty ? Is it possible then that OO will simply become a time-lagging duplicate of LO ? |
| vorbote Nov 03, 2010 8:08 PM EDT |
Brian Profitt misses the point. In fact, I want some of the meds he takes! I just posted this comment in his blog, that I think address Riddcully's comment: Oracle is in the business of making money, which "Oracle Open Office", previously known as StarOffice, is meant to bring in. Oracle Open Office is a proprietary product that uses the OpenOffice.org code base *because* Oracle holds all the copyrights to the source code and can therefore relicense it under proprietary terms. Code which license is not assigned to Oracle (previously to Sun) won't be included, no chance in hell. Did you know that go-oo the patch collection maintained by Novell and used by most Linux distros has OOXML support that works? And VBA support that works? The patches were never accepted by Sun, now by Oracle, because the authors didn't want to assign copyright or used the GPL 2 or 3 instead of the LGPL. Now the go-oo patchset is an integral part of the LibreOffice code base. It's a matter of adding two plus two. That is, like MySQL, Oracle Open Office has always followed the "Open Core" business model but unlike other examples out there, these two are useful for something more than a demo in their "community" versions. |
| hkwint Nov 04, 2010 5:16 AM EDT |
I have my doubts about the statement:Quoting:Oracle/OOo requires copyright assignment. If the don't do that, they can't sell StarOffice. AFAIK copyright of 'Oracle Enterprise Linux' is not assigned to Oracle - and still they sell it. Of course, you can get Oracle Ent. Linux for free as well, but the same goes for free office suites 'resembling' OOo. So the thing is, can Oracle sell without selling software licenses. I think their Enterprise Linux shows they can. |
| gus3 Nov 04, 2010 8:57 AM EDT |
Quoting:AFAIK copyright of 'Oracle Enterprise Linux' is not assigned to Oracle - and still they sell it.But that is a means to an end, namely increasing Oracle DB sales (along with simplifying OraDB tech support). Neither of the *Office products provide an advantage for other Oracle products. |
| vorbote Nov 04, 2010 10:00 AM EDT |
hkwint, I'm afraid you are comparing apples and oranges. In the case of Oracle Enterprise Linux, the model is very different, and in all aspects the same as Redhat's: They don't sell you the software, they sell you the services around the software. To enumerate a few: 1) The service of building a working operating system with all those loose pieces starting with the kernel. 2) The service of guaranteeing that OS will work in your hardware and won't blow up when you need it to work fine the most. 3) If the OS blows up for any reason, they'll fix it for you without charging more than you have already paid. 4) They warrant that all application software they supply and all third party ISV software certified by them will work on the OS they supply to you. Thus, basically, you don't pay for the open source platform compilation, you pay for the privilege of support. The license is a password to access their online repositories, not a boot time activation key. And in the case of Oracle Enterprise Linux, you get the warranty that your very expensive Oracle RDBMs will work without inconveniences or your money back (yeah, right.) This is not the case with Oracle Open Office. It is a pure commercial product with proprietary extensions (even if those extensions on top of OpenOffice.org are extra fonts, a bunch of templates and better CJKV support) that would not be possible to add if the software's copyright wasn't entirely Oracle's. If there were no copyright assignments Oracle would have to obtain written authorization of all contributors and (worse!) share the earnings with same as compensation. |
| Sander_Marechal Nov 04, 2010 12:36 PM EDT |
Hans is spot-on. Oracle makes money on StarOffice from license sales, not from support. They can't sell StarOffice under a copyleft license. |
| azerthoth Nov 04, 2010 12:54 PM EDT |
huh? since when cant you sell copyleft material? Or am I misreading the statement? |
| zentrader Nov 04, 2010 1:23 PM EDT |
The purpose of LibreOffice is not what Oracle can or can not do with it. The purpose is to make it "free" in both senses to the rest of the world. |
| gus3 Nov 04, 2010 1:31 PM EDT |
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMone... The LGPL is a superset of GPL rights, so this applies to the GPL as well. |
| vorbote Nov 04, 2010 5:26 PM EDT |
@azerthoth As Sander points out, Oracle makes money out of StarOffice from license sales. You can't sell a GPL license, you sell the service of supplying a ready-to-run binary and give a copy of the sources if asked to by the customer for up to three years since the date of release. Ahh! And support... @zentrader Yes, of course you are correct. The first evident goal of the Document Foundation was to force the hand of Oracle to free the control of OpenOffice.org from one single controlling interest, namely Oracle America, and place it under the control of a multi-partisan organization, namely the Document Foundation. It didn't happen, yet the fact that the LibreOffice project doesn't require copyright assignment to a controlling party means that the product they put out can evolve faster than whatever Oracle puts out in the wild, if and only if the DF can attract more hackers than Oracle can put money into human resources for their OSS project. I guess that's what we all FOSS supporters are rooting for. :-) |
| Sander_Marechal Nov 04, 2010 5:59 PM EDT |
@azerthoth: I'm not saying that you cannot sell copyleft code. You can. It's just that Oracle can't sell StarOffice under a copyleft license. After the first sale they'd loose any feature advantage they have over the free OOo version or over LO. |
| azerthoth Nov 04, 2010 6:09 PM EDT |
Thanks for the clarification Sander. vorbote, your suffering from a common misconception, not only can you sell copyleft code, you can also charge again for the source code, it needs not be supplied free of charge. Nor is there a prohibition on setting that cost at a point where the requester withdraws the request. This may be contrary to the philosophy but its been a glaring loophole in the GPL for a very very long time. |
| gus3 Nov 04, 2010 7:29 PM EDT |
@az, according to the FAQ I linked above:Quoting:Except in one special situation, there is no limit on what price you can charge. (The one exception is the required written offer to provide source code that must accompany binary-only release.)And from the clarification: Quoting:Except for one special situation, the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) has no requirements about how much you can charge for distributing a copy of free software. You can charge nothing, a penny, a dollar, or a billion dollars. It's up to you, and the marketplace, so don't complain to us if nobody wants to pay a billion dollars for a copy.http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html And from the GPLv2 itself: Quoting:3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following: ... b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange...http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html (Emphasis mine.) |
| vorbote Nov 04, 2010 8:22 PM EDT |
@azerthoth No. I don't have that misconception but my line of discourse didn't make that evident at all.That's one of the problems with the GPL: It is multidimensional. It is very difficult to convey the real meaning and implications of the GPL in economically enough words so that most of the people out there will be able to grasp the basics of the license. That would be my only critique to the GPL (1.2 or 3); that it is too subtle for most people out there. On the other hand, what are lawyers for but to muddle ideas? gus3 has already given the legal arguments, in this line of argumentation and the general case . |
| Sander_Marechal Nov 05, 2010 3:13 AM EDT |
Quoting:This may be contrary to the philosophy but its been a glaring loophole in the GPL for a very very long time. It's not a loophole at all. It's quite deliberate. I have sold GPL code, and for quite a lot of money too. The problem is building a business model around it, because the first person you sell it to can turn around and distribute it for free if he so wishes. |
| caitlyn Nov 05, 2010 11:49 AM EDT |
Quoting:It didn't happen, yet the fact that the LibreOffice project doesn't require copyright assignment to a controlling party means that the product they put out can evolve faster than whatever Oracle puts out in the wild, if and only if the DF can attract more hackers than Oracle can put money into human resources for their OSS project. I guess that's what we all FOSS supporters are rooting for. :-) I think your assertion here is unproven at best and possibly incorrect. Many hackers are willing to assign copyright. Fedora and Ubuntu both require it and participation certainly hasn.t stopped. Further, most of the major OpenSource projects have corporate backing and the key developers are on the corporate payroll. In this sense Oracle is no different than Red Hat or Novell. Please don't claim to speak for "all FOSS supporters." I am not rooting for LO to beat out OOo or vice versa. I see competition as a good thing and I wish both projects well. |
| gus3 Nov 05, 2010 11:56 AM EDT |
[devil's advocate]
Quoting:Many hackers are willing to assign copyright.Maybe it's time to start trumpeting Oracle's behavior as a "caveat donator". [/devil's advocate] |
| azerthoth Nov 05, 2010 12:52 PM EDT |
@Gus the phrase which you selected is ambiguous, and the assumption that I cant charge what I wish is based on the premise that I am limited in some manner for setting a value level on my time. As there is no such restriction it is entirely feasible for me to charge at lawyer rates or higher, that and become the model of inefficiency while doing so. As dino would have pointed at, and has, intent be damned, that's what it actually says. |
| caitlyn Nov 05, 2010 12:56 PM EDT |
@gus3: Being smart about assigning copyright is good advice in any case. Your caveat is not a bad idea. Look at the brouhaha around Ubuntu's copyright assignment and why it has raised hackles when copyright assignment documents used by the FSF and Red Hat / Fedora have not. The key is always to read what you (virtually) sign and decide if you can live with the terms. |
| gus3 Nov 05, 2010 4:13 PM EDT |
@az: Which phrase is ambiguous? "No more than your cost of physically performing source distribution"? Come on, what does it come down to besides providing it at cost? Ten or fifteen minutes work, one CD or DVD, and postage, all handled in the office. The executable program can be a profit center, but not the source code (including build files such as Makefiles) for same. Only a lawyer would think that the labor cost of such a trivial act as burning a CD or DVD is justifiably more than the cost of any other ten minutes' work, especially considering the background nature of CD/DVD burning. The FSF has lawyers on board, as well, and I suspect they will be more than happy to counter that specious argument. It holds about as much weight as SCO saying the Asset Purchase Agreement didn't really say what it said. |
| azerthoth Nov 05, 2010 4:26 PM EDT |
Too bad thats not what it says though isnt it. And if you think lawyers are going to argue against charging incremental time at exorbitant rates I think you might be in for a shock. *edit* not saying that I don't agree with you, just pointing out that what we might want something to be doesn't mean that it is that way. Playing the devils advocate and all. */edit* |
| gus3 Nov 05, 2010 4:30 PM EDT |
Okay, you make the assertion. Prove it, in a way that won't run afoul of any state bar. |
| azerthoth Nov 05, 2010 4:32 PM EDT |
Your asking me to prove a negative ... that's a fools game. Your not a fool, don't take me for one. |
| gus3 Nov 05, 2010 4:52 PM EDT |
Proving that a billion dollars for the Linux kernel source on DVD is allowed under the GPL? How is that a negative? |
| hkwint Nov 05, 2010 10:55 PM EDT |
Caitlyn: I think copyright assignment means some administrative overhead. LO can pull in any GPL-patch they "like at first sight", and move on. OTOH,I also believe Sun's stance on the issue about being able to defend _all_ code is valuable as well. I tried to look into the issue a bit (because my earlier post clearly shows I only understood 30% of the discussion), and found out it's "shared copyright" these days. MySQL and BerkelyDB require the same 'contributor agreement' it seems. So the 'shared assignment' probably is a minor threshold. But only if developers trust your company, and that seems Oracle's current problem. --- about the copying cost of some source code: I'd love to hear what a judge would say about these conflicting viewpoints. Given the recent fine of Ms. Thomas, I'm pretty sure US judges count in a different way than I do. |
| gus3 Nov 05, 2010 11:29 PM EDT |
Ms. Thomas copied without permission, and has been fined (but how much is still a question). The GPLv2 requires copying the source code, at no profit, upon the request of the recipient of the executable form. Refusing to do so, i.e. distributing executable form while refusing to distribute the buildable source form, immediately terminates the right of the distributor to distribute the program. Only after doing that, would the distributor be in the same camp as Ms. Thomas, and possibly subject to the same type of fine. |
| jdixon Nov 06, 2010 11:33 AM EDT |
> So the 'shared assignment' probably is a minor threshold. But only if developers trust your company, and that seems Oracle's current problem. The partial solution to that is a shared assignment with no resale/transfer rights. With that, the rights wouldn't have gone to Oracle when they bought Sun. That doesn't solve the problem of a change in management though. Assigning your copyrights to Caldera would have been a very bad idea, for instance. |
| azerthoth Nov 06, 2010 1:41 PM EDT |
keep banging that no profit gus3, know another way that its legal to distribute source? in print out form, so the n there is not only the time factor, but the cost of paper, ink, and monetizing wear an tear on the printer. No where does it say at no profit, If you refuse to see time as a commodity in the same manner of any other portion of the transaction, and that time, just like a DVD costs as a market rate then you will never understand the difference between at cost and theft. |
| gus3 Nov 06, 2010 2:23 PM EDT |
Not when the license specifically stipulates "machine-readable." OCR, even on a good day, is a dodgy proposition at best, and it includes no mechanism for ECC the way magnetic/optical storage, or even paper tape and punched cards, do. It can't count as "machine-readable" by any stretch of the imagination. And charging for the time is not forbidden, but charging a billion dollars US per hour for recording a CD when the normal going rate is, say, $350/hour (or whatever) for normal services, would once again be something that only a lawyer would think he could get away with. Throw in the likelihood that it'll be the lowest-paid secretary on the pool's seniority list, who is doing the copying, and that argument only confirms what most people already believe about lawyers: It's 99% of the lawyers that give the other 1% a bad name. |
| azerthoth Nov 06, 2010 3:14 PM EDT |
ambiguous again, the source is machine readable the format is not. *edit* GPLv2 actually stipulates any medium. */edit* |
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