[Project_owners] Project takeover request

[George A. Booth]

Re: quoted text, following.

Exactly so, as you have quoted.

What the copyright policy recognizes and you seem to miss is it is not 
within the power of mozdev to control or assign any other person's 
copyrights. It says clearly that the projects must be made available, 
parenthetically by the author, not that mozdev will make available. It 
is a requirement to be met by the author.

Let me say it this way. David Boswell doesn't have any copyrights to 
what you write, and can not assign any, unless you give that authority 
to him explicitly. It's illegal. That prohibition and protection is the 
entire point of all copyright law. Mozdev can declare and claim all the 
way to the courthouse and it's still going to lose the lawsuit.

I have a still clearer analogy, Wal-mart can have signs all over the 
parking lot that any car parked there becomes the property of Wal-mart, 
and won't matter a whit. When you park there, it's still your car.

What is not stated in the policy is what the consequences are for a 
project which is not made available under the MPL, thus my naming two 
possible means of policy enforcement : prominent notice of the lack of 
compliance and the removing of non-compliant projects. I have thought of 
a third : mozdev can block access to the project code and refuse to 
download the extension until the copyright is brought in line with 
mozdev policy.

OK. That's the last I have to say about it. If someone doesn't believe 
me, he call a lawyer. If someone wants a pissing contest, he can face 
upwind.


eric.jung at yahoo.com wrote:
> Indeed. From http://www.mozdev.org/copyright.html
>
> "All code for each project hosted on the Site must be made available 
> under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) unless otherwise noted on the 
> project pages. More information about the MPL can be found at 
> http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/. If a project is not using the MPL it must 
> to use one of the other OSI-approved open source licenses"

> From: Philip Chee <philip.chee at gmail.com>
> To: project_owners at mozdev.org
>
> >On Sat, 04 Aug 2007 12:28:15 -0500, George A. Booth wrote:
>
> > The project I adopted, Rimwheel, didn't have any licence declaration,
> > GPL, MPL, copyleft, standard copyright, nothing. While the policy of
> > mozdev is that all posted code is open source, mozdev doesn't actually
> > have the power to decide such a thing for authors. The mozdev's
> > enforcement extends only as far as the ugly option of removing projects
> > that don't comply. At the least, mozdev could give notice that the
> > project isn't open source until the copyright specifics are posted.
>
> >>I think under the Mozdev T&C if your project doesn't explicitly declare
> >>a licence it automatically gets assigned the MPL.
>
> >>Phil
>