On 10/05/2010 06:35 PM, Nicolas Pitre wrote: > From the minutes: > > | * ARM wish to keep rights for anything ARM produces, perhaps > | through back grant > | * Future code will be done by Linaro, so by others > | * Issue is with copyright instead of license > | * MIT/X11 does allow relicensing > | * ACTION: Does BSD allow relicensing? > | * GLIBC is a interesting case > | + GLIBC prefers copyright assignment to FSF and re-licensing > | under the LGPL > | + This assignment may inhibit Linaro from re-granting back to > | ARM > > Isn't the FSF copyright assignment non exclusive, i.e. the original > copyright holder still keeps a right to do anything with his own copy?
I put on the audio of this conference call in the background today, because intellectual property is a topic that interests/infuriates me. If I understood the current situation correctly, the principle point of contention relates to the FSF's position on patents, which translates into "ARM's lawyers will not sign the standard FSF assignment." During this part of the discussion, it was revealed that the existing assignment agreements for GCC and GDB involve confidential terms which address those problems. They have not worked out such details for GLIBC. Personally, I am intensely curious about those exact terms, though we are unlikely to ever discover the details. Thus, there exist assignment issues that go beyond simple copyrights. Speculatively, I believe the wording of the FSF assignment basically requires all patents to be assigned along with the copyrights. If you think about the wording of the GNU licenses, that language appears to be strictly necessary for the FSF. Simultaneously, that would give good reason for ARM's lawyers to be recalcitrant. Or so I imagine. I am eager to see how this soap opera gets resolved, but it will be entirely anticlimactic if more undisclosed terms cut through the red tape. -- Zach Welch CodeSourcery zwe...@codesourcery.com (650) 331-3385 x743 _______________________________________________ linaro-toolchain mailing list linaro-toolchain@lists.linaro.org http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-toolchain
