[OpenJDK Rasterizer] Rasterizer replacement proposal

[Mark Wielaard]

Roman Kennke <roman.kennke at ...> writes:
> > > The remaining issue is
> > > that the copyright is assigned to the FSF. I have hoped that you would
> > > review my code before I start the copyright grantback dance for that
> > > code. I am currently discussing this issue with Tom Marble and Mark
> > > Wielaard.
> > 
> > What is the copyright grantback dance? If you wrote the code what
> > possible issue can there be? No one should be able to take away
> > your rights to your code.
> > Frankly a lot of this is still learning for us.
> 
> When I wrote this code for GNU Classpath, I assigned copyright to the
> FSF, just like OpenJDK contributions are copyright-assigned to Sun. With
> the difference that the SCA is automatically granting the contributor
> all rights to the code, while with the FSF CA I need to go through a
> copyright grantback procedure, in order to make sure that all the code I
> 'want back' was originally written by myself.

To clarify, in most GNU projects for which the FSF is the guardian there is a
process similar to the SCA. The individual contributing the code signs a
contract with the FSF (that an officer of the FSF counter signs) and when
appropriate a company disclaimer is filed with the FSF that employees are
allowed to make contributions to the project.

The contract assigns copyright of the code to the FSF, that way the FSF can make
sure all code they distribute is clean and they can eaily guard the copyleft
provisions of the project. In return the FSF promises to only release the
contributed code or any derivative work under free terms to the public at large
(this is also the reason the FSF cannot grant any extra rights to Sun to take
any of that code proprietary).

The contributor does get a grantback of all the rights assigned to the FSF if
they request those. They FSF explicitly asks the contributor to notify them if
they are exercising their grantback rights so they can put that information in
their books (that way whenever they see a copy of that particular code without
the normal FSF GPL copyright statement on it, they know to first ask the
contributor whether or not they authorized that and not immediately assume that
the copyright notices on that work are wrong/infringing).

Till now, nobody having contributed code to the GNU Classpath project has ever
exercised their grantback rights. So this is also new to us, and takes some work
to properly do the correct paperwork.

> > And when legal etc say we can only look at contributions made under
> > an SCA, we pretty much have to do what they say. Perhaps
> > there are other rules which allow it but  I don't know that,
> > and as an individual engineer I don't want to be making calls myself.
> > I'd probably get me or Sun in trouble if I did.
> 
> I understand this very much.

Indeed. And you could see FSF-legal as being the counterpart of Sun-legal in our
case. We like to do all the right things and not get the FSF in trouble or make
them do any unnecessary work. Which is why we are also a little careful to first
ask whether the code is really good enough/fits your scheme before involving the
FSF legal department.

> > The rush (it was a close thing even if that's not apparent)
> > to get the source launched for JavaOne meant that we are nowhere
> > near on the infrastructure to support it etc.
> 
> This is understood too. No worries 

Yes, we do appreciate this! It is a really large step for all of you involved.
Sorry if we seem a little bit too eager at times. But our intentions are good
really, we do want to see openjdk happen and become a big and large community of
 enthousiastic people around the java source code.

Cheers,

Mark