Comment by bugsy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bugsy | Hacker News Reader

For this comment, let's assume that Google is correct that it owns copyright on all code he writes, even in his free time and not pertaining to his work at Google.

Now, that presumed, when an author contributes to the project, they explicitly agree to license their contributions under to the project's BSD license.

However, Google owns this code being contributed, and yet they, as a corporate entity, have not consented to the licensing of their contributions being distributed under the BSD license. Until they do, in writing, signed by the corporate legal counsel, or whoever else is able to sign contracts on their behalf, the code contributed is not BSD licensed because the author, which is Google Inc, did not agree to it in writing, and thus distribution and use is now a violation of Google's copyright since they did not legally consent to have their code released. As the owner of the code, Google alone can consent to its use, and not the "code slave resource" who happened to produce it, whose very soul Google now contractually owns.

This could be a problem for the project.

In general, projects need to require that anyone contributing new code represent that they alone are the owners of the copyright to the new code being contributed. If you contribute code owned by someone else and not explicitly licensed in a compatible manner by that other entity, then you have code in the project that presents a serious legal liability.

When I was contributing to an Apache project they had a standard waiver form for your employer to sign to protect them in those sort of cases. I imagine most other major open source projects will ave something similar.

But in this case, we released the code , under Google Copyright, into a BSD project and under a BSD license.

It's not clear who is 'we'? Do you (plural) have the legal right to sign contracts and take out bank loans on Google's behalf? If so, yes, you represent Google legally as the official legal representative and this is all cool. The code should just have a link to the signed document placing the code under BSD.

So contracts and bank loans take a higher strata of employees to approve, but I've been given authority on open source matters. It's not practical to have a signed document on file with every project, but we do have such documents on file with the FSF, Apache and many other projects.

It's not always practical to do these docs, but they are out there.

This is one of the great things about open source, through the use of real , trusted open source licenses, we state our corporate intention quite clearly, and then we don't need to have a huge load of paper that accompanies every project.

We don't , for instance, have paperwork clearing the ip on all the projects we use at Google. The linux kernel alone is a huge work of shared copyright. No paper....

OK, in a previous comment you said 'Google (my employer) ... cleared about 200 (75% of those requested) projects in the last year for copyright release'. Now you are not the guy that this article is about, or are you? Who released the projects? "Google released" means someone else there at Google, as opposed to "I, as a representative of Google, released 200 projects".

Now, many posts later, you are saying "we released" and "I've been given the authority" as if you were the one authorized to "release the copyright".

But previously you said someone else did. Did you get the authority in the time between the two comments? Who are you? Who at Google can verify that you have the authority to release Google code? What documentation of this is there? You say no paperwork is necessary? Is there an official list somewhere of which code Google legal/corporate has released? How does your term "copyright release" differ from placing something under a open source license? Usually 'releasing' copyright means placing something in the public domain. Are you using the common usage when you use the term "release". What about the 25% not 'released'? Did any of those represent code that had already been placed by the coder in a outside project? Were they informed afterwords to remove the code?

Here we have a coder who is contributing to a project who says the author of the code for copyright purposes is Google Incorporated. But he is not the legal representative of Google. What legal authority does he have to transfer ownership or determine contractual licensing terms of code owned by Google on their behalf? If he does have this authority, or it has been granted him by you or someone else, it has to be in writing or it means nothing. Yet you are saying it doesn't have to be documented anywhere?

Maybe this is authorized by the appropriate people at Google. Maybe not. Without any documentation of it, there's no legal bias for saying this © Google code is BSD licensed.

From Wikipedia:

"Chris DiBona (born October 1971) is the open source and public sector engineering manager at Google. His team oversees license compliance and supports the open source developer community through programs such as the Google Summer of Code and through the release of open source software projects and patches on Google Code. In the public sector space, he looks after Google Moderator and the polling locations API."

Based on how authoritatively Chris DiBona is speaking, he is effectively representing Google in these comments and in the GitHub comments. He hasn't disclaimed this at all, and his position at Google would suggest he has the authority to make these statements.

Thanks, that's all I'm asking.

And all I'm bringing up in my comment that led to this subthread is that when someone contributes code to an open source project and that person does not personally own the code themselves or have the legal authority to transfer license, then there is a serious legal issue involved that have to be taken very seriously.

With my own open source projects, people contributing need to be able to grant license on all the code they contribute. If someone came in with code owned by their employer with their employer's copyright on it and not their own, it would be absolutely critical to verify that their employer knew about it and cleared the licensing for that specific code in writing, or from some very public facing repository on the company website with explicit documentation about the license. Any sort of 'well it should be OK I think' or 'they told me it was all right' would raise red flags and require much more explicit permission.

It will be interesting now to see what the reaction of other contributors will be to the new policy that some animals are more equal than others. I have had no problem contributing to open source and having my contributions listed as "copyright by various contributors". But once one contributor gets his own name separated out in the code headers, then I want my own name in all those code headers as well, and I wouldn't be surprised if others would want the same as well.

Re: your ridiculous "some animals are more equal than others" claptrap: the reason I gave Google its own line in the license file rather than adding it to CONTRIBUTORS like all of the other copyright holders (myself included) is because Google is not actually a code author, it is a legal entity which happens to own copyright to some of the contributions made by one of the contributors.

The English-language text reads:

Copyright (c) 2009, Snap Framework authors (see CONTRIBUTORS)

Copyright (c) 2010, Google, Inc.

Putting Google in the contributors file would be inaccurate because that list is for people who have put code into the project. It is a difference in categorization and essentially I am saying "the copyright to this code is owned by these people and this corporation".

You are confused. By writing down Google's name rather than your own after the copyright symbol, you are saying that they contributed the work to the project. You are the author, and may have associated moral rights (such as the right to be identified as the author), but it's not your code. It's their code, and they've done the contributing. All you got is the pay check you were going to get anyway.

Actually, no. Contribution and copyright are two different things. In the United States, every word you write is copyright by you. However, you can assign your copy rights to another entity. This allows copyright and authorship to become disjoint, even though they start out as the same thing.

Here is an example: The Apache Software Foundation requires copyright assignment on all contributed work. Developers who contribute code must assign their copyrights to the ASF. Their name is still in the contributor list, because they are a contributor of code. However, the Apache Software Foundation is the sole copyright holder of the works.

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