[oi-dev] Copyright for contributors - not in files, OI branded zones, binary compatibility

[Joerg Schilling]

Repost as the content seems to have been lost before....

Garrett D'Amore <garrett.damore at dey-sys.com> wrote:

> > Now that Sun was sold to Oracle and Oracle stopped contributing to the project, 
> > we need to be very careful and I thus strongly recommend to change the CDDL 
> > boilerplate to again contain "CDDL version 1.0 only" in case someone edited a 
> > file. Without doing that, Oracle could in theory create a CDDL-1.x or a CDDL-2.x
> > that says "everything could be used by Oracle as closed source".
>
> Yes.  Its actually a little worse than that -- the boilerplate *itself* is possibly subject to copyright, and using Sun's boilerplate in new files may actually require crediting Sun/Oracle with joint ownership. 
>
> These problems are precisely why I've authored new boilerplate, stating explicitly 1.0, made the boilerplate public domain explicitly, and posted that boilerplate in usr/src/prototypes.  I encourage anyone writing *new* files to use those files as starting points.
>
> For folks editing existing code, if the file already carries a notice you cannot modify if.  But if the license does not already explicitly say 1.0, you can insert a new notice like this:
>
> /*
>  * Portions Copyright 2013 Joe Contributor.  Contributions by Joe Contributor are made available under
>  * the terms of the CDDL 1.0 only.
>  */

Well, the CDDL does not mention unmodifyable parts, so you may change anything 
from a file under CDDL (except from Copyright notices that mention the 
Copyright owners).

But the CDDL boilerplate is not such a copyright notice.

Given the fact that (from a legal point of view) changing something from:

 * The contents of this file are subject to the terms of the
 * Common Development and Distribution License (the "License").
 * You may not use this file except in compliance with the License.

to:

 * The contents of this file are subject to the terms of the
 * Common Development and Distribution License, Version 1.0 only
 * (the "License").  You may not use this file except in compliance
 * with the License.

is _limiting_ the rights, this can of course be donf by anybody
as long as this change is (as in this example) compatible to the CDDL.

You would need the permission of the copyright holders if you like to _extend_ 
the granted rights. But this does not happen with limiting to v1.0 only.

One additional note for German coders: The German law explicitely forbids to 
agree to contracts that contain claims that are not known at the time the 
contract was signed. For this reason contrutcs as "... or any later" are void 
for Germans.

Jörg

-- 
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