From hin-tak.leung at cimr.cam.ac.uk  Wed Jun  7 19:04:44 2006
From: hin-tak.leung at cimr.cam.ac.uk (Hin-Tak Leung)
Date: Wed, 07 Jun 2006 18:04:44 +0100
Subject: [Rd] do developers need to assign rights to someone
In-Reply-To: <1984DE40-A1A7-49DE-BBCE-0B4F3D5970C6@sympatico.ca>
References: <9448B15C-0CCA-4E4C-A355-60C80066FF0D@sympatico.ca>	<44840325.6020201@cimr.cam.ac.uk>	<Pine.LNX.4.64.0606050729190.6381@homer21.u.washington.edu>	<A44D8E26-C414-4C96-ADC2-9C8F19B29A09@sympatico.ca>
	<1984DE40-A1A7-49DE-BBCE-0B4F3D5970C6@sympatico.ca>
Message-ID: <4487072C.8040204@cimr.cam.ac.uk>

Kevin B. Hendricks wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Just in case this is an issue.  I freely give all of my patches and  
> changes to the R source code to whomever holds or keeps the copyright/ 
> rights for this project.  If it matters I have not signed any FSF  
> agreements but I have done so with Sun for OpenOffice.org and would  
> be willing to do so for this project.

AFAIK there are only two common reasons for assigning-copying over
(instead of having just a license notice saying somebody can do
as he/she wish with your code as you intended) is

(1) possible copyright infringement is imminent, and the R core team
needs to sue somebody on your behalf

(2) dual-license/commercial licensing - i.e. the R core team want to
relicense R with a different license, then they need to have the 
copyright to do that.

situation (1) is rather unlikely for R, but you never know
- historically, the FSF uses that argument to request all changes to
GCC to be signed over, I think.

As for (2), Sun people for obvious reasons want to get you to sign over
copyright, because they want to relicense the openoffice code under
the commericial staroffice license.

I don't think either (1) or (2) applies too closely to R, but then, this 
is just my opinion...

HTL



[Rd] do developers need to assign rights to someone
Hin-Tak Leung