How to Share?
I have a situation that I am wondering how others may have solved. I have an open source (BSD) project whose copyright is owned by the company I work for. Another person, working for another company (in another country!) wishes to contribute to this project, which I think is great.
How is the ownership of copyright usually sorted out in these situations? Is it shared by both parties? Does each party maintain copyright to their respective contributions? Does the party wishing to contribute sign over copyright ownership? Is there another alternative that I haven’t thought of? Surely this situation comes up a lot; how is it usually handled?
May 8th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
I know with FreeBSD that anyone who contributes owns their contributions, but they have to be made under the same license. Some files that were written entirely by one person would say “Copyright Fred Blogs” in them. So FreeBSD are limited to using their code under the rules of the BSD license - they can’t change the licensing terms without getting agreement from every contributor, which is not a practical possibility.
The other approach is that taken by the FSF and Sun Open Source. Contributors have to sign an agreement that basically gives ownership of all their contributions to FSF or Sun. This is what allows Sun to put the JDK out under both GPL and commercial licenses - they own all the code, even though some is contributed by third parties.
May 9th, 2008 at 1:31 am
Find yourself a copyright lawyer. Seriously, in this case you’re dealing with copyright laws of two countries, sometimes there are really weird things that can’t happen, so a little legal counseling wouldn’t cost much and reduce the chance of problems. It’s possible that the concept of signing a copyright off outside a work for hire situation doesn’t exist in the contributor’s country.
Lachlan said all the important things about individual or joint copyright, so I won’t repeat here. It all boils down to this question: does the company wants absolute control over the code (even later changing its mind and start releasing new version only under a proprietary license) or it wants to ensure that the code is open source (even if the company is bought by an evil third party some day). In my company we decided to have only individual copyright assignments, not in the ownership of the company so we can ensure that the code will remain open source as long as at least one of us want it this way.
May 9th, 2008 at 4:41 am
<MandatoryDisclaimer> I am not a lawyer. </MandatoryDisclaimer>
Unless you take action to do something different, each party will own copyright on what that party wrote. It is often useful if one party owns all the copyright — because then that party could choose to do something like releasing it under a different license, or having standing to sue over copyright violations. If you want to protect these sorts of rights, then you’ll need to sign something conveying the copyright. (Contracts related to copyright should always be in writing.)
June 4th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
IANAL
Lawyers help, but International Law is pretty easy to read up on. Understanding copyright and software licencing is not difficult
Copyright law across the [developed] world is pretty consistent - it you are the author of a piece of intellectual property (verse or code), you are the copyright holder without needing to assert it (a good example is this post comment). Software licences are useful since you can unabiguously inform recipients of your intellectual property what rights they have in using your copyright.
I’ve worked in several collaborative projects where we’ve received code (and developed jointly) from companies and institutions in France, Germany, China, UK, Austria, Italy, Netherlands, Norway to name but a few. In cases of sole development, the respective organisation owns the copyright (normally for exploitation purposes, unless the contract states otherwise).
The great challenge is keeping track of where IP came from, what its purpose is, how (if at all) your IP depends on it, and whether your licence is compatible with it.
Licence compatibility is key here - you can accept code from your colleagues company and link to it in your code as long as the licences are compatible and who know who owns the copyright (so you won’t get sued). @Lachlan’s note on FreeBSD insisting on the same licence is generally about distributions - Apache and Eclipse insist on you using Apache 2.0 and CPL licences respectively.
If you’re worried about joint-copyright, ensure it doesn’t happen or get the lawyers in. Modules, interfaces, design-by-contract - you can easily write software without stepping on each other’s IP.
Just *never* accept GPL 2.0 code (GPL 3.0 looks like a nightmare), unless it includes the Classpath Exception. LGPL 2.1 or Apache 2.0 is OK with [modified] BSD.
Good luck.
Random Note: [modified] BSD (pure BSD states that your code is copyright the Regents of the University of California) gives any receiver of your code extremely liberal rights - including the ability to close-source the distribution under the [modified] BSD. Same goes for Apache 2.0, MIT, and X11.