> The fundamental issue is
> that the user does not have the same licensing rights as the company.
> In fact the company _owns_ rights to the code not given to users, so
> contributions have to be owned by the company too.
No they don't. The developer can give a sub license that grants broad
reusability rights. It happens all the time in the closed source world.
For example:
Developer hereby irrevocably grants customer a transferable,
non-exclusive, worldwide, fully-paid up, perpetual, irrevocable,
sublicensable, royalty-free, license to use, exploit, copy,
reproduce, distribute, export, publicly display, publicly perform,
sublicense, modify, improve, enhance and make derivative works of the
Intellectual Property with the right to sublicense, provided, however,
that nothing herein shall be construed to grant customer any other
rights in and to the Intellectual Property or to waive any rights of
Developer in and to the Intellectual Property.
The above does not require that the person contributing give up their
rights to the code, it does however allow the company doing the primary
development to relicense the code as they see fit.
> You have get approval from the users to release their changes under a
> different license than the user who is using the software.
Which can then be sublicensed.
>
> In the PostgreSQL case, the users and the community have the same rights
> to the code --- they are equals, which is not the case in your proposal.
This point has some validity although I think the whole equals think is
a little inflammatory. It is not our intent to harm or make less any
community contribution.
Sincerely,
Joshua D. Drake
Command Prompt, Inc.
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