samba - Jul 2011 - Proposal to change Samba contribution copyright policy.

Hi all,

Some history. Samba has historically only accepted code
with personal, not corporate copyright attached.

There were a couple of good reasons for this in the past, one
of which was that we preferred GPL enforcement decisions
to be made by individuals, not by corporations.

Under GPLv2, a license violator loses all rights under the
license and these have to be reinstated by the copyright
holders, which made controlling who those copyright holders
were very important. People are usually much more reasonable
than corporations :-).

With the move to GPLv3, this is much less important than it once
was. The GPLv3, unlike GPLv2, allows an automatic reinstatement of
rights under the license if a violator cures the license violation
problem within 30 days.

Given this, I'm proposing that we modify our policy slightly
to allow corporate owned copyright within Samba. Note I'm
not proposing open season on corporate (C), and we'd still
prefer to get individual copyright, or assignment to the
Software Freedom Conservancy (as we have done in the past).

The reason to prefer individual, or SFC owned copyright is
for ease of relicensing components within Samba. Over time,
we have moved certain libraries within Samba from GPL to
LGPL, for example the tdb and talloc libraries. Re-licensing
like this is easier if we don't have to get permission from
a corporate legal department, but can just directly ask the
engineers themselves, so I'd still suggest that we keep personal
or SFC copyright for code that goes into libraries, or code that
might be moved into a library.

But for things like build fixes for specific platforms,
I don't think it's necessary any more to insist on
personal copyright, which can delay or prevent engineers
from giving us good fixes.

I already raised this with tridge, who told me that he
had been meaning to raise the very same issue with me
(just one more proof that great minds think alike :-),
so I promised to write this email to propose it to the
lists in general.

Please comment and let us know what you think about
this possibility. Samba Team members get to vote, but
we'd be really interested in hearing from all Samba
users to understand if this is something the community
thinks is a good idea or not.

Cheers,

	Jeremy.

I have no issue with corporate contributions. They have been helpful for several
projects, including the Linux Kernel. Though your concerns are valid the GPL V3
is well worded to cover them efficiently.

The main thing is to make sure that said contributors and their legal
departments understand the license and how it works.

On Tue, 2011-07-12 at 14:19 -0700, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Some history. Samba has historically only accepted code
> with personal, not corporate copyright attached.
> 
> There were a couple of good reasons for this in the past, one
> of which was that we preferred GPL enforcement decisions
> to be made by individuals, not by corporations.
> 
> Under GPLv2, a license violator loses all rights under the
> license and these have to be reinstated by the copyright
> holders, which made controlling who those copyright holders
> were very important. People are usually much more reasonable
> than corporations :-).
> 
> With the move to GPLv3, this is much less important than it once
> was. The GPLv3, unlike GPLv2, allows an automatic reinstatement of
> rights under the license if a violator cures the license violation
> problem within 30 days.
> 
> Given this, I'm proposing that we modify our policy slightly
> to allow corporate owned copyright within Samba. Note I'm
> not proposing open season on corporate (C), and we'd still
> prefer to get individual copyright, or assignment to the
> Software Freedom Conservancy (as we have done in the past).
> 
> The reason to prefer individual, or SFC owned copyright is
> for ease of relicensing components within Samba. Over time,
> we have moved certain libraries within Samba from GPL to
> LGPL, for example the tdb and talloc libraries. Re-licensing
> like this is easier if we don't have to get permission from
> a corporate legal department, but can just directly ask the
> engineers themselves, so I'd still suggest that we keep personal
> or SFC copyright for code that goes into libraries, or code that
> might be moved into a library.
> 
> But for things like build fixes for specific platforms,
> I don't think it's necessary any more to insist on
> personal copyright, which can delay or prevent engineers
> from giving us good fixes.
My main concern is that it will make it harder to explain the line at
which we require a company that becomes gradually involved in Samba to
jump though the hoops for individual copyright.  This is typically a
very tedious process, particularly because of the lack of a standard
guidance from the Team (because is is typically a modification to
employment agreements, and because they are both confidential and
different per company). 

But in exactly the same sense, I personally feel quite bad about scaring
a company off making wiki contributions (about how to do smartcards and
Samba4) because our policy had no distinction between types of
contributions.  It would have been really good to have their experiences
in the wiki - and I'm sure the same applies to build fixes and other
small but important changes. 

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org

On Tue, 2011-07-12 at 14:19 -0700, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Some history. Samba has historically only accepted code
> with personal, not corporate copyright attached.
> 
> There were a couple of good reasons for this in the past, one
> of which was that we preferred GPL enforcement decisions
> to be made by individuals, not by corporations.
> 
> Under GPLv2, a license violator loses all rights under the
> license and these have to be reinstated by the copyright
> holders, which made controlling who those copyright holders
> were very important. People are usually much more reasonable
> than corporations :-).
> 
> With the move to GPLv3, this is much less important than it once
> was. The GPLv3, unlike GPLv2, allows an automatic reinstatement of
> rights under the license if a violator cures the license violation
> problem within 30 days.
> 
> Given this, I'm proposing that we modify our policy slightly
> to allow corporate owned copyright within Samba. Note I'm
> not proposing open season on corporate (C), and we'd still
> prefer to get individual copyright, or assignment to the
> Software Freedom Conservancy (as we have done in the past).
> 
> The reason to prefer individual, or SFC owned copyright is
> for ease of relicensing components within Samba. Over time,
> we have moved certain libraries within Samba from GPL to
> LGPL, for example the tdb and talloc libraries. Re-licensing
> like this is easier if we don't have to get permission from
> a corporate legal department, but can just directly ask the
> engineers themselves, so I'd still suggest that we keep personal
> or SFC copyright for code that goes into libraries, or code that
> might be moved into a library.
> 
> But for things like build fixes for specific platforms,
> I don't think it's necessary any more to insist on
> personal copyright, which can delay or prevent engineers
> from giving us good fixes.
> 
> I already raised this with tridge, who told me that he
> had been meaning to raise the very same issue with me
> (just one more proof that great minds think alike :-),
> so I promised to write this email to propose it to the
> lists in general.
> 
> Please comment and let us know what you think about
> this possibility. Samba Team members get to vote, but
> we'd be really interested in hearing from all Samba
> users to understand if this is something the community
> thinks is a good idea or not.
Jeremy I have no objections in principle, but for copyrights that cover
feature changes if companies want to retain copyright I think we should
request that they defer any decision on licensing (need to find
appropriate legal wording) to the team so that we are not constrained by
disappeared, sold or otherwise unresponsive or recalcitrant companies in
case we need to change the license of one of the components.

What do corporate contributors think ? Is that something your legal
department can swallow, do you need the team to give promises about the
kind of licenses we will consider in case changes are needed. I think we
have ever used GPLvX, LGPLvX, and public domain/extremely permissive X11
style license. And I think we can restrict ourselves to that set or
equivalent.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce
Samba Team GPL Compliance Officer <simo at samba.org>
Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, Inc. <simo at redhat.com>

Hi,

On Tue, 12 Jul 2011 14:19:51 -0700
Jeremy Allison <jra at samba.org> wrote:
> Given this, I'm proposing that we modify our policy slightly
> to allow corporate owned copyright within Samba. Note I'm
> not proposing open season on corporate (C), and we'd still
> prefer to get individual copyright, or assignment to the
> Software Freedom Conservancy (as we have done in the past).
Would these proposed policy changes also apply to ctdb, or just Samba?

The reason I ask is that I'm currently working on a PMDA for ctdb[1]
which is based off some GPLv2+ code with corporate (Silicon Graphics)
copyright assignment. It may be better suited to live outside the ctdb
tree anyway, but thought I'd check.

Cheers, David

[1] Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) Performance Metrics Domain Agent for ctdb
    git://oss.sgi.com/ddiss/ctdb ctdb-1.0.114.2-pmda

Hi Jeremy,

Jeremy Allison wrote:
> 
> ...
> 
> Given this, I'm proposing that we modify our policy slightly
> to allow corporate owned copyright within Samba. Note I'm
> not proposing open season on corporate (C), and we'd still
> prefer to get individual copyright, or assignment to the
> Software Freedom Conservancy (as we have done in the past).
> 
> The reason to prefer individual, or SFC owned copyright is
> for ease of relicensing components within Samba. Over time,
> we have moved certain libraries within Samba from GPL to
> LGPL, for example the tdb and talloc libraries. Re-licensing
> like this is easier if we don't have to get permission from
> a corporate legal department, but can just directly ask the
> engineers themselves, so I'd still suggest that we keep personal
> or SFC copyright for code that goes into libraries, or code that
> might be moved into a library.
> 
> But for things like build fixes for specific platforms,
> I don't think it's necessary any more to insist on
> personal copyright, which can delay or prevent engineers
> from giving us good fixes.
Honestly, to my taste, what you are proposing is very vague.
It is also not very clear. You say you want to loosen the
requirement. But keep the requirement for library code
and code that might be moved into libraries sometime in
the future (however you want to estimate this).
And prefer personal copyright anyways. I get the impression
that you also want to base the decision of whether to accept
a patch with corporate copyright on the impact that the patch
has and the broadness. The example you give is "build fixes".
This would rather be an innocuous example, compared to a
patch adding a new feature or one changing core server behaviour.
So what is the procedure you imagine for taking patches with
corporate copyright? Do you imagine that we would decide
individually whether the coprorate copyright is OK for a given
patch based on some vague and personal judgement of the nature
of the patch? It sound like that to me. But I think that this is
not really practicable. I think we need a clear rule which
we can adhere to.

It is also not clear to me what the benefit of such a change
in policy would be. If you want to basically only accept
corporate copyrighted patches when they dont exceed a certain
level of impact, then I don't see that this is necessary at all.

Maybe I don't understand the meaning of the copyright of
a patch. In Samba, to my understanding, a person holds a
copyright on a file if she/he has made contributions on that
file which exceed a certain size, so that she/he is added to the
copyright/license boilerplate comment. (I was not aware that
we track indiviual possibly tiny patches as well.) And what you
proposed seems to imply that you'd like to not use corporate
copyright on changes this big anyways. So maybe you can clarify
this, so that I can understand the point.

So modulo explanations that can clarify my confusions, I do
rather dislike this proposal, the main reason being that the
criteria for decision are so vague. But I also don't see the
benefit. Has the present policy prevented major contributions
in the past? And if so, would we accept major contributions
under corporate copyright or just the odd buildfix patch that
could also be donated to a team member or the SFC?

Cheers - Michael

> I already raised this with tridge, who told me that he
> had been meaning to raise the very same issue with me
> (just one more proof that great minds think alike :-),
> so I promised to write this email to propose it to the
> lists in general.
> 
> Please comment and let us know what you think about
> this possibility. Samba Team members get to vote, but
> we'd be really interested in hearing from all Samba
> users to understand if this is something the community
> thinks is a good idea or not.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> 	Jeremy.
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