Copyright assignment

[mjg59]

The fundamental problem with projects requiring copyright assignment is that there's an economic cost involved in me letting a competitor sell a closed version of my code without letting me sell a closed version of their code. If this cost is perceived as larger than the cost of maintaining my code outside the upstream tree, it's cheaper for me to fork than it is to sign over my rights. So if I have my own engineering resources, what rational benefit is there to me assigning my copyright?

Comments

Depends on your focus

[http://gould.cx/ted/]

Your engineering resources are working on something entirely different and you don't want to waste your time on maintaining the fork. So it's then cheaper for you to contribute the small fix in your platform and move on.

Re: Depends on your focus

[mjg59]

Yeah, for trivial patches that's certainly true. More substantial ones imply that you've got an ongoing interest in the project, at which point it's less so. And if there are several different entities in the same position, you're in a position to pool that maintenance. So it seems that the cases where copyright assignment is most going to benefit the upstream (ie, large features that would take a lot of work to reimplement) are the ones that are least likely to be granted.

Re: Depends on your focus

[http://gould.cx/ted/]

That's certainly true. But, if you're planning on contributing large amounts of resources it's probably the situation that you can negotiate with the person asking for CA. Depending on the situation, you might be better off paying them to do that work instead of doing it yourself as they'd have an understanding there. Of course, that is *highly* situation dependent.

I think there is also many cases where creating a new organization makes sense. I think a good example of this is Linaro which is staffed to do "general ARM work" where the individual chip makers then have their own staff provide specialized features for their individual SoCs.

At the end of the day, business agreements are more confusing than why we have so many programming languages :-)

Re: Depends on your focus

[(Anonymous)]

So copyright assignment is only sensible for projects where the only community contributions you encourage are one-liners?

Re: Depends on your focus

[cjwatson]

Arguments along the lines of "you might be better off paying them to do that work" often seem to rest on the idea that developers are interchangeable resources; I think we both know that isn't generally true. If you (as a company) are planning on contributing large amounts of resources to a project, then it may well be the case that you already have somebody with significant skills and/or enthusiasm that could be brought to bear, and those can't easily be transferred to another project nor brought into existence in the company you were planning to pay.