make the existence of the Tahoe-LAFS Software Foundation apparent

[zooko]

From pipermail/tahoe-dev/2013-March/008129.html and pipermail/tahoe-dev/2013-March/008120.html.

Announce the existence and legal status of the Tahoe-LAFS Software Foundation on the front page of https://Tahoe-LAFS.org .

[daira]

gdt wrote:

#1938 seems right, but there are two separate issues, and I think it only covers the first point:

• foundation transparency (with details from my mail)

• relationship of contributions. Is there a CLA? Copyright assignment? Where are the documents to review? This should be easily findable as well.

The latter should probably be on the Dev page, with a pointer from the FAQ.

[leif]

I've been following Tahoe development for a couple of years and only very recently became aware of the copyright assignment requirement.

In addition to the transparency requested above, without a statement about what the Tahoe-LAFS foundation will and won't do with the copyright, I would not be comfortable assigning copyright (or otherwise granting the foundation more rights than I grant the general public).

The FSF includes this important text in their ​copyright assignment contract:

The Foundation promises that all distribution of the Work, or of any work "based on the Work", that takes place under the control of the Foundation or its agents or assignees, shall be on terms that explicitly and perpetually permit anyone possessing a copy of the work to which the terms apply, and possessing accurate notice of these terms, to redistribute copies of the work to anyone on the same terms. These terms shall not restrict which members of the public copies may be distributed to. These terms shall not require a member of the public to pay any royalty to the Foundation or to anyone else for any permitted use of the work they apply to, or to communicate with the Foundation or its agents in any way either when redistribution is performed or on any other occasion.

I would (begrudgingly, as it goes against my belief that copyright should be abolished) agree to a copyright assignment contract under terms like these.

Pending the resolution of this issue, I am closing the one significant-enough-for-copyright pull request I had open.

[K1773R]

can we get this resolved? id like to see ​https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs/pull/39 being merged :)

[zooko]

Peter: could you please take over this ticket?

[leif]

Zooko and I talked about this in person sometime last year and I forgot to update this ticket. If I remember correctly, the takeaway was that the copyright assignment thing was actually a misunderstanding. If I'm not mistaken, what is actually desired is a license which permits the foundation to relicense the code under non-free licenses. This license need not be exclusive, which makes it fine with me: I am happy to infinitely-license all of my contributions CC0, Public Domain, WTFPL, GPL, and TGPPL. What I'm not happy to do is grant someone an exclusive license to sue someone for copyright infringement on my behalf.

Another thing to note is that the Foundation's license to relicense the code is not being used by Least Authority's non-free Tahoe derivatives: Least Authority is exercising the same time-limited rights that everyone gets under the Transitive Grace Period Public License (as of our conversation sometime in 2013, at least).

Anyway, this (hopefully correctly-recalled) understanding resolves the issue for me, but not for everyone else... to close this ticket, I think the licensing and the existence of the foundation needs to be made clear somewhere in the documentation.

[leif]

I closed #2253 as a duplicate of this.

[exarkun]

This effort is ... maybe not completely doomed at this point ... but gosh it's going to be a lot of work. Contributors have not been asked to agree to any such terms. At this point, all contributors must be contacted and asked to agree to the terms. Changes from anyone who can't be contacted or who doesn't agree must be removed or rewritten from scratch.

What is the Tahoe-LAFS Software Foundation's current position on this?

[meejah]

Ticket retargeted after milestone closed