Copyright assignment requirements should be clear when submitting patches

[Ted Gould]

When people submit patches on some projects they require copyright assignment. It would be nice if this was more clear and told to them up front. It sucks if they spend time on a patch, and then realize that they no have copyright assignment. Perhaps we could do something in the bug tracker to make it clear that any patches uploaded will require copyright assignment. That way at least they know before uploading, if they didn't know before writing it.

[Karl Fogel (kfogel)]

Not all projects require copyright assignment, though some do. Can you say which projects you encountered the problem in? (Of particular interest to me: any of the ones listed at http://www.canonical.com/contributors ?)

Your idea of having some sort of automated support for reminding people about copyright assignment requirements is interesting. Working out the right place to do that in the UI could be tricky. It'll be easier to think about after we have a better sense of the scope of the problem.

A simple solution that any project can take right now, though, is to mention such a requirement in their hacking guidelines -- the document that one would naturally read before starting a patch anyway.

[Ted Gould (ted)]

On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 13:44 +0000, Karl Fogel wrote:
> Not all projects require copyright assignment, though some do. Can you
> say which projects you encountered the problem in? (Of particular
> interest to me: any of the ones listed at
> http://www.canonical.com/contributors ?)

We haven't encountered any problems. I just worry that we're
effectively putting someone into a hard position by asking when they've
already written the patch. They've already put the work in, obviously
they'd like it included, and now we're asking them to do something that
they may not want to. So they're forced to make a choice in a more
difficult position than they should need to.

Specifically I was talking about evolution-indicator, but I've talked to
other OS people about how this was an issue in their projects before,
and the point just kinda hit me to say "Launchpad should do this
better."

> Your idea of having some sort of automated support for reminding people
> about copyright assignment requirements is interesting. Working out the
> right place to do that in the UI could be tricky. It'll be easier to
> think about after we have a better sense of the scope of the problem.

It would be interesting if we could do it someway like what is done for
Ubuntero support. So that a project, any project, could have a
copyright assignment and I could set up my account to assign copyright.
I imagine most of the FSF projects that require copyright assignment
would appreciate that as well. You could then GPG sign it, upload it,
and remove the warning.

  --Ted

[Karl Fogel (kfogel)]

Well, the UI trickiness comes from the fact that different projects can have very different legal requirements. For example, Launchpad itself requires a copyright assignment sent in by email (but it does not have to be cryptographically signed). I know other projects that use a web form. Still other projects require an actual fax. And some of the are assignments, while others are "copyright license agreements", which is a different thing.

Really, the most practical thing we could do would be to have a slot where the project fills in a URL, and then Launchpad would throw that URL in front of the contributor at the appropriate moment, saying "Please see URL for project FOO's copyright contribution requirements" or something. The page at URL would have all the details (for example, for Launchpad itself, that page would be http://canonical.com/contributors).

[Jonathan Lange (jml)]

Another alternative is for a project to be able to specify "We require copyright assignment" as a setting, and to provide a system for project drivers to say "this person has assigned copyright" or "this patch has assigned copyright", while the _actual_ assignment mechanism takes place out of band.

If this were the case, then patch submission could raise a warning if you have not already assigned copyright.

However, I'm skeptical of this actually solving the problem of "I've done a bunch of work and now it's irrelevant because I need to transfer copyright." If the warning is on the patch submission page, then people are only going to see it when they are about to submit a patch. The only way to warn such potential contributors before they actually write code is to have documentation on the project's website.

[Ted Gould (ted)]

On Wed, 2009-09-16 at 01:30 +0000, Jonathan Lange wrote:
> However, I'm skeptical of this actually solving the problem of "I've
> done a bunch of work and now it's irrelevant because I need to transfer
> copyright." If the warning is on the patch submission page, then people
> are only going to see it when they are about to submit a patch. The only
> way to warn such potential contributors before they actually write code
> is to have documentation on the project's website.

I don't disagree, and I guess my feeling here is that any effort towards
making people aware sooner is worthwhile -- certainly it won't help
everyone at all times. But, it does work towards less negative
surprise.

Perhaps it should just be part of the project's license. "We're GPLv3
with Copyright assignment to the FSF" Then the goal would be to place
the project's license in more useful places. Because, I could be
Richard Stallman and not want to write patches for BSD licensed projects
as well :)

  --Ted

[Karl Fogel (kfogel)]

In practice, there are many reasons a potential contributor should make
contact with a project long before getting to the stage of having a
finished patch of significant size. There are design issues, testing
issues, etc. Hopefully, the project actively encourages people to ask
questions and communicate *before* they start work on something.

Copyright assignment is just one of many such issues that shouldn't
surprise a contributor after they've done a lot of work. I don't think
it needs any more special treatment than the other issues get.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

2009/9/16 Ted Gould <email address hidden>:

> I don't disagree, and I guess my feeling here is that any effort towards
> making people aware sooner is worthwhile -- certainly it won't help
> everyone at all times.  But, it does work towards less negative
> surprise.
>
> Perhaps it should just be part of the project's license.  "We're GPLv3
> with Copyright assignment to the FSF"  Then the goal would be to place
> the project's license in more useful places.  Because, I could be
> Richard Stallman and not want to write patches for BSD licensed projects
> as well :)

I think this is a good idea; perhaps this bug should be reoriented to
just ask for that, because we seem to agree that showing it at the mp
submission point is not super useful.

We could just say as a best practice that it should go into the
freeform project description, but perhaps it's useful to have it as
structured data.

--
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>