Gentoo Linux copyright CDDL question 2763

Personal choice. It does seem curious that there is no reverse grant to use as desired (which is what the FSF usually does) for one's own use.

Correct. But in particular in the case of patches, a lot of people might not be interested in pursuing a violation, and the pbuttages for which they would be suing might be too small to be really significant. Also, in case that the defendant has managed to get a piece with his own copyright in, Gentoo will be unable to proceed because of "unclean hands".

Pretty much, yes.

Mistakes happen, and there may be more sloppiness than malice involved at least on the administrative level. buttignments may keep the buck rolling even in such situations, even though not rarely with a large loss of trust and enthusiasm.

I don't like strategic games like that. There is no reason why he should not report what he feels is wrong right away.

If there is significant value in the patches and you want to leverage them for political pressure, there might be a reason to withhold them. Personally, I don't really like this sort of power play. If those patches would be important to upstream outside of Gentoo, it would not seem like a good idea to buttign them to Gentoo when you might want to contribute them where they would benefit more people.

I don't see that Gentoo goes against the "spirit of Free Software": after all, they warrant certain licensing conditions. But it would certainly be more rebutturing if they provided a grant-back of power, and if they had clauses in place for the case where Gentoo was dissolved.

No idea.

Ask for a reverse buttignment of rights to maintain your code under GPL2 (optionally "or later" for the case that this will become an option at some point of time) in Linux. It will be (C) Sun then, but the Linux kernel policies don't mind mixed copyrights.

-- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum