On Thu, 2002-11-21 at 14:58, Ronnie Sahlberg wrote:
> I am not going to surrender any copyright to anything I write.
> What I write I write and I have copyright over. Period.
>
> If you want a transfer of copyright from from me to you on stuff I write,
> that may be arranged but
> would then involve you tranfering a huge amoung of money to me first.
>
> Basically, if you are not willing to pay me normal consulting fees for every
> single
> hour I spent developing, there wont be a transfer of copyright either.
I think the key word was "voluntary". Some people want to maintain
copyright on their work (which is perfectly fine). Some don't care.
What concerns me is that we have a couple of hundred people who are
copyright holders of the product, and as they change jobs, move, lose
interest in the project or, heaven forbid, die, then the project could
be prevented from improving because of license issues. If people (who
didn't care) could voluntarily turn their copyright over to a central
body, then it would reduce the chance of the product's evolution being
blocked by licensing issues.
> >
> > By doing this, we can make changes to the license (by majority vote),
> > and not have to track down every individual who has made an addition to
> > the product since it's inception.
>
> Why would this be good?
This isn't about overruling people who object. It's more about being
able to handle cases where changes may need to be made to the license,
and ANY of the authors have disappeared.
> Some companies may have a problem with the licence since it does not allow
> them do do whatever they
> want with ethereal. That would then be that or those companies problem and
> not ethereal's problem.
> I could not care less about some random companies problem with the ethereal
> licence, they just have
> to deal with it and use other tools instead that have acceptable licences.
I think you might be confusing exploitation with benevolence. I don't
think this is an attempt by commercial interests to co-opt the project.
Most of the people who work for commercial companies contribute to the
project with the goal of improving the quality of Ethereal. They aren't
forced to, and in fact I appreciate it when companies come out and are
willing to help the community dissect what would otherwise be
proprietary protocols.
> A much simpler solution that probably works well for everyone:
> Companies that can not or wants not release decoders for ethereal have
> several other, for them, much better options they might want to consider.
> They can develop them as plugins for tools like Sniffer, GOSS etc and
> distribute it to those tools instead.
They could do certainly do this. But I would think it a waste to turn
away people who are willing to improve the Ethereal product just because
they don't want to be sued by their employers.
>From a political standpoint, I can see you argument. But I am looking
at it from a technical view. I would like to see Ethereal be the best
product available, commercial or otherwise. I think it is good to
encourage commercial interests to add their protocols to the product
(it's much easier and more complete than reverse engineering). I would
hate to see that they can't contribute because an agreement can't be
reached on licensing.
--
Devin Heitmueller
Senior Software Engineer
Netilla Networks Inc