Re: Clarifications of licences on pgfoundry

On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 9:06 AM, Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-05-18 at 07:53 +0100, Dave Page wrote:
>
>> > For example, pg_batch is clearly marked "BSD licence", yet the docs and
>> > many of the files are marked "Copyright (c) 2010, NIPPON TELEGRAPH AND
>> > TELEPHONE CORPORATION".
>>
>> Don't mix up copyright and licence. They are not the same thing at all.
>
> I didn't mix those things up, I just used them in the same sentence.
> They are two aspects of "ownership" and appear to offer conflicting
> messages, which is a concern to some users.

No, copyright is about ownership. The licence is a right granted by
the copyright holders to other to govern their *use* of the code.

>> No - pgFoundry projects are licenced and copyright-attributed as their
>> authors see fit (as long as it's an open source licence of course).
>
> Yes, are they open source licences?

All the options on pgFoundry are, yes.

>> The PostgreSQL Licence is not the same as any of the BSD variants, so
>> that is not a safe presumption to make.
>
> If, as you say, the licence is unclear then whether-or-not it is an open
> source licence must also be unclear.

Not at all. If it's listed on www.opensource.org, then a licence is
"open source". Why do you think I busted a gut to get the PostgreSQL
licence approved when we realised it wasn't BSD?

> The copyright holders can change the licence in future as they see fit,
> as we've witnessed on other formerly open source projects.
>
> Since the licence is unclear now and the future is subject to change, I
> think its safe to say that those projects are fairly unsafe for open
> source users.

That is the case for *anything*. We could change the PostgreSQL
licence if we wanted, but it would take a huge amount of effort and
approval of every contributor ever whose work could be considered an
artistic contribution.

With PostgreSQL we rely on the sheer number of contributors to ensure
the licence will never actually change. We cannot have such a
guarantee for most smaller projects of course - simply attributing
copyright to a non-existent legal entity such as PGDG (or as I
understand it, even an actual entity) doesn't actually change who
legally owns the copyright.

To get the protection I think you seek, I believe we'd need to create
a legal entity to own the copyright and then have every contributor to
anything on pgFoundry sign a copyright assignment agreement that
grants the legal entity copyright on the current and all future
versions of that work, as hosted on there. And even then, there's no
guarantee that the legal entity couldn't be bought or change it's
charter, unless there's some way to irrevocably build things into its
statutes.

Of course, as you know I'm not a lawyer but have spent a fair bit
of^W^W^Wfar too much time talking to them about this sort of stuff, so
I at least *think* I know what I'm talking about :-)

-- 
Dave Page
EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise Postgres Company