Re: Re-Releasing PEAR packages under the BSD license

On Thu, Dec 14, 2006 at 11:53:58AM +0100, Markus Wolff wrote: > Sylvain Beucler schrieb: > >I see that 'PHP Group' is marked as copyright holder of PEAR packages, > >so it wouldn't be needed to contact each and every contributor to > >change this. > > This is problematic anyways, as by German law, for example, it is not > possible to "give away" your copyright to another person or organisation > - the only exception being if you're a programmer employed by said > organisation. All you can give away is a license for i.e. free usage of > your source code, but the copyright always remains that of the > individual who came up with the code. > > Thus, I doubt that even if I'd write "copyright by The PHP Group" into > my sources, this would have any serious effect if it ever came to a > lawsuit (for whatever reason). > > I think in Austria there's a similar law, but I don't know for sure. Hi Markus, I think there's a way to deal with this, because for example all Emacs code is owned by the FSF, including several contributors in Germany. On the other hand, if you gave the PHP Group free usage over your PEAR code, this prolly means the PHP Group can choose whatever license it's distributed on :) The reason why I'm "nitpicking" about this license issue is that I believe strong legal basis is part of what made FLOSS successful. The SCO lawsuit against the Linux kernel a couple years ago makes me think every project can be concerned :/ -- Sylvain