Copyright assignment

[Benoit Boissinot]

On 9/4/07, Jonathan S. Shapiro <shap at eros-os.com> wrote:
> I apologize for opening this topic. It was bad judgment. Since I opened
> it, I better explain what I meant.
>
> > Jonathan S. Shapiro dubitò:
> >>On Mon, 2007-09-03 at 20:14 +0200, Emanuele Aina wrote:
> >
> > >> That would work if Selenic was the only copyright holder.
> > >>
> > >> Right now you would need to ask every Mercurial contributor to relicense
> > >> his portion...
> > >
> > > Hmm. This is a major bug that needs to get discussed, because it creates
> > > a potential legal problem for Selenic, but this exchange certainly is
> > > not the place.
>
> Emanuele has put his finger on a problem: Selenic is not the copyright
> holder for mercurial. In fact, a case can be made that no copyright
> holder for much of mercurial exists, because the contributions are
> heavily interleaved.
>
> This creates two problems:
>
> 1. It is not clear whether anybody can *enforce* GPL for mercurial
>
There are major contributors (Matt being the main one). Anyway since
mercurial joined the software freedom conservancy
(http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org/members/) I'm pretty sure they
would give legal advise for this case.

http://lwn.net/Articles/204870/ has some more information about that.

regards,

Benoit