Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

Rob Myers said:
> As a result of the current SCO debacle ("we own your code, prove that we
> don't!"), the Linux leadership is looking at adding a representation of
> authority to contribute to their submission procedure:



Ah, I think I get it now.
I don't think the "authority to contribute" is the important bit.
I think the "chain of trust" is actually the piece that could
stop an SCO lawsuit.

If SCO sues IBM saying "this chunk of code is ours",
then a list of every single coder who touched the Libre
version and what their contribution was would act as
pre-emptive evidence establishing authorship before
a lawsuit even happens.

If you have a list of Alice, Bob, Charlie and the whole
alphabet gang associated with every piece of code, then
unless those people worked for SCO at some time, then
SCO doesn't have much of a case to begin with.

"No, it's OUR code and Alice contributed this,
Bob wrote that, Charlie patched that, and here's
our records to show it."

This isn't much help if an overzealous SCO employee
(or an SCO mole) contributes SCO code to a Libre effort.
The "authority to contribute" directly conflicts
with the standard Employee Agreement. But at least
a record of the chain of authors will limit the damage.

> Note that this is still external to the license
> (like the FSF keeping their
> sign-offs separate from the GPL).
> Does having this separately make it *better*,

Most OpenSource licenses boil down to
a grant of copyright and a disclaimer of warranty.
Both of these are fairly passive from a legal standpoint
if I understand them correctly.

If you are the sole author, you can grant whatever
rights to copy, distribute, and derive your work
to whomever you want.

Warranty Disclaimers are effectively putting a
big "As Is" sign on your software so no one sues
you because "it doesn't work".

Neither of these two requires any agreement with
another party. you, as sole author, can just do
it and it's done.


I >THINK< that "authority to contribute" type stuff
requires more of an agreement-type contract rather
than an open ended declaration. Doesn't FSF require
people who are responsible for their software packages
to file something from their employer saying
"our employee can work on this and we disclaim any
copyright interest" ?

If nothing else, since Employee Agreements are
an agreement between two parties, I think the
authority to contribute stuff needs more accountability
than simply having the author declare it to be so.

-- 
"Impatient Perl" => Perl geek in about a week.
http://www.greglondon.com/iperl/index.html
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