[Cabal] Copyright assignment

[Sean Egan]

On 1/26/07, Ethan Blanton <elb at psg.com> wrote:
> Since I hadn't replied to this yet ... I'm somewhere in the middle, on
> this.  I think requiring it will cause us to lose contributors and
> present a complication, but I think allowing it isn't a terrible idea
> -- for example, I would be willing to sign my copyright over to IMF,
> under the agreement that IMF would not relicense my code to a non-free
> (insert licensing argument over what is free) license.

I believe we can make it nothing more than a click-through form you
fill out before getting to the "submit patch" page in TRAC (see
http://code.google.com/legal/individual-cla-v1.0.html for example, and
note that that part about it needing to be mailed or faxed is a lie,
I'm told).

If that's true---and I'll ask the lawyers---I think it would only
discourage contributors who have some sort of weird objection to
assigning away their copyright, which I'd picture being a very small
minority.

> So, if there's any value in that sort of optional assignment (I don't
> know), I'm all for it.  Otherwise, I'm not convinced.  I'm not dead
> set against, either.

There is value in that. Obviously, we'll never have 100% of copyright
on Pidgin, but every bit helps, I'm told.

-s.