Mahara

This has been discussed in Moodle developers community recently. See the Martin Dougiamas' post at moodle.org. Basically, contributors retain the copyright (or copyleft, to be more precise here) and they publish their work under GNU GPL v3. This helps to protect the project from being re-licensed against the community willing in the future, for example by They-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, Ltd. and who would buy the single copyright holder. From this point of view, the possibility of re-licensing looks more as a danger than a benefit. And the current process running in Moodle shows that re-licensing is possible if everybody is happy with it.

I can see the benefits of assigning the copyright to a single entity in case of a need to assert the rights. My question is, is there a problem with letting the copyright assigned to the original authors and re-assigning them eventualy in the future in case of a law suit or so? 

Also, there may be a theoretical problem with some countries where copyright can't be re-assigned, can't be assigned to a company abroad, to a company in New Zealand or whatever. For example, the Czech law works with the concept of "authorship" only but the term "copyright" does not exist as a legal term. The authorship can't be re-assigned. If a developer writes a code for a company, there is an agreement where she as an author gives the company an exclusive right to exercise all rights associated with her code.

Hi Richard,

Thanks for the invitation to contribute. I’m not sure I’m familiar enough with the challenges to meaningfully comment, primarily because it’s difficult for me to see how someone might meaningfully breach copyright here in a way that compromises Mahara. If someone takes some Mahara code and uses it as the basis for their own proprietary system, well, good luck to them. If someone designs a customization for Mahara and decides not to share it, well, sure, they’re not playing fair – but what is wrong with this? The ongoing commitment of the open source community to Mahara itself need not be threatened in such a case. I would have thought this would be viewed an acceptable risk as far as OS were concerned. The risks of assigning copyright to an organisation seem to me to undermine the very principles Mahara was built under.

Is there a concrete example of where copyright would have been useful in an open source project? Where is the precedent here, and what are the real implications of a copyright breach? I need more information on this, apologies in advance for my ignorance!

Cheers,

Hi Richard -- thanks for allerting me to this thread, and important discussion for any open community.

I have been a little removed from the direct involvement in the Mahara development -- so may not be up to speed in all the issues facing the foundation.

From my perspective as an educator, advocate and user of free software, I think its more important to do the right thing (rather than doing things right from a mechanistic legal perspective.) 

If we go back to the original intent of Copyright under the Statute of Anne -- (which many folk cite as origins of copyright) we see that the Act aimed to promote public rights to copy materials -- hence "copy right"  The intent was to establish an Act for the encouragement of learning in response to the perpetual monopoly held by publishers between the mid 1500s and late 1600s.

From my personal perspective a Contributor Assignment Agreement -- is not necessarily in the spirit of respecting and honouring individual freedoms of code contributors.  The copyleft provisions within the GPL are, in my view, adequate to protect the freedoms of the code and would still provide ample foundation for litigation in the event of "blatant infringement" of copyright. "Blatant infringement"  of the GPL.  is still blatant  irrespective of who owns the copyright ;-)

The difficulty in this type of litigation lies in multiple ownership of code contritutions -- however,  I don't see a strong enough moral base on which to argue a requirement to assign copyright over to a single entity. I think the right thing to do is to respect ownership of copyright as a community asset of the contributors rather than a single owner. 

Hope this helps the team and foundation in doing the right thing :-)

Hi guys,

I can understand where you are coming from wrt to the benefits of a single entity controlling copyright.  Certainly legal proceedings would be easier, and changing the license would be easier in future.  From a lawyer's point of view this makes total sense.

However, I think this is outweighed by the community considerations and the way open source communities generally work:

• People like stability and trust, they don't need the spectre that one entity might "change the license" at some point in the future (this fear is communicated to me frequently, especially by those spreading FUD about open source, so I'm glad I have a good answer to it).
• People like credit - they feel justifiably proud to own part of an application used all over the world.  This in turn increases contributions and commitment from everyone.
  
• People like simplicity. Licensing issues are at best tiresome, and more often just confusing and totally misunderstood.  The less paperwork the better.
  
• People like relationships.  Common goals and shared stakes.

In return, I feel sure that the Mahara community will help fight any battles that need to be fought on behalf of the project that they feel ownership in.  Actual legal proceedings should never be necessary if the community is acting in a coordinated fashion.

I know this from experience: the Moodle community is always putting pressure on those "breaking the rules" (whether actual GPL infringements or just established norms of behaviour) and attempts at commercial forks just faded away.

In a worst-case scanario where a big company took the project and started selling an improved version under a new license, I could imagine easily someone in the community buying a copy of the commercial fork and bringing the new code back to the parent project, no matter what new license they had illegally placed on their version.  Imagine that company trying to take a community to court! 

Hi,

nothing new to say. Just my +1 for CLA  (better and easier for contributor + protection and anti-fud for the Community). 

 Ciao :-) 

Well, even I can imagine the world without these agreements, if you really insist on having one, my +1 for CLA.

To paraphrase the known Linus' quote, I would say CLA is like a condom. It is better without it but it is safe to wear it if you do not know who you sleep with.

I'm no expert on legal matters or licensing more generally. I understand and am comfortable with the CLA option and don't think I'd need to spend time an money on that. Its also easy for us, as a Mahara partner, to sell on the idea to our customers who are funding work which we and they would like to see in the public domain.

I can see that there would be circumstances where the CAA option might give more strength in defending Mahara against abuse, but I would also be concerned that it also might be more open to abuse by those managing the project (I'm not suggesting this is likely). I'd feel less happy about this option without consulting lawyers and given the international dimension it would be time consuming and costly. I feel that we'd be protecting against one or two scenarios rather than offering broad protection.

Overall I would vote for simplicity and go for the CLA option.

 Mick.

Hi everyone,

We have now come up with a draft contributor policy, which you can read here:  http://wiki.mahara.org/Developer_Area/Contributing_Code

This is similar to the policy for the Linux kernel, with an extra clause added at the suggestion of Rochelle Hume of Paxton-Pennman Et Al.

Please let us know what you think about it. We shall wait a week for community feedback before finalising the policy.