[Nagiosplug-devel] Contributing patches and retaining copyright

[Andreas Ericsson]

Thomas Guyot-Sionnest wrote:
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> On 06/05/09 04:02 AM, Ton Voon wrote:
>> Hi Simon,
>>
>> On 5 May 2009, at 22:40, Simon Bennett wrote:
>>
>>> I've got a couple of patches to the core Nagios plug-ins set that  
>>> I'd like
>>> to contribute back to the project. They were created for our  
>>> customers but
>>> some might be generally useful. The FAQ mentioned to post to this  
>>> list if
>>> you'd like to contribute but want to retain copyright. The copyright  
>>> in this
>>> case is my company's.
>> Any contributed code that gets back into the main code from now on is  
>> accepted on the basis that the copyright can be given to the Nagios  
>> Plugin team. I've updated the FAQ entry to be clearer on that policy: http://nagiosplugins.org/copyright
>>
>> We'd be happy to hear about any changes, but only if you are willing  
>> to relinquish copyright.
> 
> I totally agree about getting copyrights for the team for legal issue;
> at the same time can't we leave the original code copyright to its
> original author?
> 
> That means the we'd still have full copyright, and the author would
> retain full copyright of the original code, but not for modified version
> by the team.
> 
> IANAL, so does that makes any sense (legally)?
> 

No, it doesn't. It would only make sense if the plugin team rewrote the
plugin from scratch, without looking at the plugin sent by the "other"
copyright holder.

However, anyone can sign over the right to legally defend their work
in a court of law. If they couldn't, a *LOT* of lawyers would be out of
a job really, really quickly ;-)

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231

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