On 6/24/14, 4:15 PM, Leandro Lucarella wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu, el 24 de June a las 15:55 me escribiste:
>> On 6/24/14, 3:32 PM, Leandro Lucarella via dmd-internals wrote:
>>> If the copyright assignment requirement were well grounded, then maybe
>>> it would be justified, but to require it just based on a potential
>>> unknown and extremely unlikely fear seems pointless.
>>
>> What seems pointless to me is this long and protracted discussion
>> around... around what? What or whom are we talking about protecting
>> here? It's not a practical matter, and it's not a matter of
>> principles. If protecting the copyright of one's work is high on
>> one's list of priorities, OSS is not the best place to be.
>
> But your position is contradictory.

No. And this kind of sophism is the very kind of thing I'm hoping to not exchange forever, yet look at us.

> If you want to protect the software
> to keep being free, then you need a proper organization, not a private
> company, because as I said, same as people can disappear or change their
> mind (yeah, even after 14 years), then companies or Gods like Walter
> could too. If you are offering false protection at the price of
> bureaucracy for contributors (is not about not wanting to cede the
> rights ONLY), it doesn't sound very appealing.

It's not bureaucracy, and any "we should do X" without you putting skin in the game I just tune out. I don't want to trust 100 people about the future of D.

> This is why any large groups organize themselves in institutions that
> doesn't rely on individuals and have well defined constitutions or
> missions.

If you think that's the right path, then go ahead and define an organization. Again, if you say "we" should do so there's zero value in it.

>> Crap has happened before, among reasonable people, and in ways that
>> had not been predicted.
>
> Exactly, so why crap couldn't happen with Walter or Digital Mars?

Again, I'd rather trust Walter to act in the interest of D than an ill-defined collection of persons.

>> We don't have money. We don't have lawyers.
>> We don't want to spend time analyzing, projecting, estimating, or
>> speculating. We want to keep things simple and save everybody
>> involved complications while keeping everything as open as possible.
>
> Then forget about copyright assignment, is an unneeded and expensive
> hassle :)

The unneeded and expensive hassle is this.

>> This very discussion is a huge waste of time wanking over nothing.
>> What the heck are we even _talking_ about, folks?
>
> Apparently requiring copyright assignment for any contribution.
> Honestly, I think I will have a hard time convincing my bosses to cede
> their  right over the code they are paying me to produce. VERY hard to
> sell.

Sociomantic-copyrighted code in the D compiler in addition to DigitalMars-copyrighted code doesn't seem like the more the merrier to me.


Andrei
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On Jun 23, 2014, at 5:25 PM, Walter Bright via dmd-internals <dmd-internals@puremagic.com> wrote:
> 
> What practical right does one retain when it is licensed under Boost?
> 
> Ya know, I don't want to retain rights to D. I originally tried to make it public domain, until several people informed me that PD was not a legal concept in many countries. Boost was the next best thing. I want to continue to make D as available as possible, and that means the license may need to be adjusted in the future. If contributors do not share those goals, then yes, they should reconsider contributing to D.
> 
> I do understand the issue of retaining credit for one's work. But I believe that the github commit history amply supports that goal, and is one of the reasons I am very much in favor of using github for D.

I’m past the point of caring about copyrights for my own work.  Even about requiring attribution.  If someone really wants to claim my work is their own, whatever.  All I really care about is that the code exists and hopefully someone benefits from it.  My perspective was a bit different when I was younger and more interested in being recognized for my efforts though.

Regarding licenses in general, I think the issue with releasing code into the public domain is that in some countries it’s not possible for the creator of something to completely absolve themselves of ownership of that thing.  I suspect that assigning the copyright to someone else should be acceptable under that framework, but it would be worth looking into.  Maybe the GCC folks would know, since they do require assigning copyright to them when code is contributed, correct?

On 24 Jun 2014, at 0:01, Walter Bright via dmd-internals wrote:
> I'd like to know that, too. What is the difficulty with copyright assignment? I can't address that if I don't know what bothers you and David about it.

[Note: I'm not dealing with non-copyright-assignment CLAs here, that's a separate discussion.]

It boils down to a simple cost-benefit analysis.

Copyright assignment is often discussed in the context of open source projects which are distributed under a copyleft license and backed by a single corporation. In this setting, my personal opinion is that it is an issue on which reasonable people can disagree. However, most of the arguments for copyright assignment do not apply to our situation, while virtually all of its downsides still do, making it a pretty obvious choice.

Let's quickly have a look at why you might want to require copyright assignment as a company who initiated an open source project.

   A.1) There are claims that it is necessary to be able to efficiently combat license violations in court, as only the copyright holder is able to do so. [1]

   A.2) It allows you to monetize software by offering a copyleft-licensed version for free and selling commercial licenses without those restrictions.

   A.3) It allows you experiment with open source development, while keeping the option to later commercialize the product. In particular, this might be important for startups later being bought by a company that does not do open source development.

   A.4) If the need arises to change the license in order to meet the stated project goals (e.g. because of legal flaws discovered in the license), this is easy to do.

Now, let's see how they apply to our situation. 1) is moot, as we want D to be in a public-domain-like status, and pretty much the only violation of the Boost license possible is to remove the copyright statements anyway. 2) and 3) are similarly irrelevant, as such intentions would be compatible with the terms of the Boost license in any case.

So we are left with 4). If you want to have a serious discussion about the issue (which I think you really want to in order to get the community behind you) instead of just deciding that copyright assignment is a good idea because it gives you the warm fuzzies, you either need to agree that this is a very improbable thing to happen – and note that I am not claiming that is entirely impossible in order to reach my conclusion below –, or provide good evidence why this is not the case.

As for why I think that it is unlikely to happen: We all agree that our goal for D is to be used as widely as possible, commercially or not, and we use pretty much the most liberal license possible. So, there are only two scenarios left to consider:

   A.4) a) Some big, rouge company decides to use the frontend source code to build their own, incompatible system and aggressively markets it to the harm of D. They are allowed to do this under the Boost license. We thus decide that the whole liberal licensing thing was a mistake and want to change DMD back to a copyleft license like GPL, so that they at least do not benefit from our future work on D. This arguably is a rather unrealistic scenario, but even then, we would not need to re-license the code. Instead, we could just begin applying that more restrictive license from that point on and continue to use the old code under the terms of the Boost license.

   A.4) b) Somebody discovers that the Boost license actually carries some restrictions that nobody thought of before, meaning that it is in fact not the near-perfect emulation of "do anything you want, as long as you retain the copyright notices" we want it to be.

So, with 4) b), we have identified a single situation where it would be beneficial to have a single copyright owner for the project. In order to make an informed decision, we need to weigh this possible advantage against the costs and risks of requiring copyright assignment. The first step towards that is to try and estimate how likely it is that such a situation will arise. To make a weighty argument for copyright assignment, this scenario should also have a big negative impact on our goal to make D a widely used language.

As I said above, I think such a scenario is very unlikely. If you want to get me to agree that requiring copyright assignment for DMD is a useful thing to do, you'll have to convince me otherwise. Here is why I don't think you have much of a chance to do so:

   B.1) The Boost license has not only been written by a team of experts at Harvard Law School, but is also built on the experience with a several other widely used liberal licenses. To the best of my knowledge, no issues requiring such a license change have been found with any of them.

   B.2) You mentioned GPLv2/GPLv3 and the BSD license earlier. I don't think that these are not relevant for the sake of this discussion. As far as GPL goes, the motivation for the update was mainly to introduce a few new restrictions with regards to DRM and Tivoization that were not consistent with some other parts of the (complex!) version 2. Quoting Richard Stallmann, "it is important to note that upgrading is a choice. GPL version 2 will remain a valid license, and no disaster will happen if some programs remain under GPLv2 while others advance to GPLv3." And in the case of the BSD license, what was changed was to remove an additional restriction (advertising clause) from the original text. I think you would find it hard to argue that the Boost license, in its minimalism, might contain a similar restriction which we could want to remove later.

   B.3) The Boost license is very simple, compared to monsters like the GPL or even the old 4-clause BSD license. One possible problem would be that it is discovered that "to use, reproduce, display, distribute, execute, and transmit the Software, and to prepare derivative works of the Software, and to permit third-parties to whom the Software is furnished to do so" somehow does not appropriately reflect the rights we want to give our users. I don't think there is a valid reason to believe that this is any more likely than, for example, the copyright system itself changing in such a way that copyright assignment doesn't work out as intended. I'll be pleasantly surprised if you provide me with any evidence to the contrary.

   Much more likely, if still unlikely, is that an issue is found with the "unless such copies or derivative works are solely in the form of machine-executable object code generated by a source language processor" part of the license. However, even if this clause turned out to somehow not apply to an important use case of druntime/Phobos, this would only mean that the copyright statement would have to be distributed alongside the program. I think you will find it hard to argue that this is a serious problem for the future of D to the point where your earlier "kill switch"/"enormous bet"/"holding hostage" analogies are more than just empty rhetoric. After all, many widely used libraries require some kind of attribution. For example, I don't think there would be many people more unwilling to acknowledge third-party code than a company like Microsoft in their flagship product, yet they are happily attributing Andrei for his work on Loki in Windows. And remember, we are still talking about the worst thing that could happen in a very hypothetical scenario here.

I hope that at this point we (and especially Andrei) can agree that the only argument left in favor of copyright assignment is a diffuse fear of some legal quirk being uncovered in the future, hoping that aggregating copyright would protect us against it.

Now, as I said above, while I think that such a situation is rather hypothetical, I acknowledge that there is indeed a tiny chance that it will occur in the future. However, there is a number of very much non-hypothetical downsides to requiring copyright assignment, right now. Let me try to summarize some of them:

   C.1) It adds an extra barrier for new contributors to join. This is a fact, regardless of whether it is worth it or not. The fact that the FSF makes this step extra cumbersome by requiring a physical form to be sent (faxed?) in does not exactly help here either.

   C.2) In some jurisdictions (mostly european, e.g. Germany, Austria) it is not even possible to give away your copyright, requiring the agreement to be full of scary-looking legalese to provide a fall-back.

   C.3) Because of A.2) and A.3), many open source developers have a pre-existing notion of copyright assignment being unfair towards the contributors, regardless of whether it applies to our situation or not. The behavior of Oracle after acquiring Sun generated quite a bit of bad press recently.

   C.4) Contrary to what you suggest by bringing up Tango over and over again, requiring copyright assignment makes it _harder_ to incorporate external code. For example, assume that there is a nice piece of code in Boost (the library) that we'd like to adapt for D, e.g. some code from Boost.Context that would be useful for implementing fibers when porting druntime to a new platform. Even though the licenses are perfectly compatible, we can't use that piece of code, unless we manage to convince the original author to assign copyright to us. Your Tango example would only be a valid argument if we assume that all interesting code ever written would be assigned to Digital Mars, but I think we can safely agree that this is megalomania.

   C.5) Requiring copyright assignment will make it entirely impossible for some people to contribute, as it can be impossible to get the legal departments of your employer to agree. I happen to know two people in quant finance where they could contribute to open source projects, but were forbidden to sign even Contributor Licensing Agreements that don't require copyright assignments, like those from Google or Mozilla. There was a post on reddit a while back where a startup founder had signed a Google CLA and that generated quite a bit of legal hassles when their company was bought, regardless of how irrelevant that was, simply because it raised a red flag with the acquiring company's legal team. Or see this statement by a well known Linux kernel developer who claims that he wouldn't have been able to contribute to Gentoo if it required copyright assignment: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/82061

   C.6) You wrote earlier that "the credit has a lot of value to one's professional career", and I couldn't agree more. Yet at the same time, you are asking people for the permission to take it away from them. Regardless of whether you actually intend to do that or not, the simple possibility makes this a rude thing to do without a good reason.

You might dismiss some of these points as irrelevant, and you might even convince me that they are. But you can't dispute the fact that copyright assignment is a contentious issue (see e.g. [2]-[5]) and will turn users and developers away before you even have a chance at trying to convince them too.

For one, I certainly wouldn't have started to contribute to D if it had required assigning my copyright to a random commercial company. Of course, I have been around for a while now and having met you in person I do believe you that you indeed act in good faith. Still, I don't think there is a good reason to require copyright assignment and I don't see myself handing over the copyright for my druntime/Phobos contributions or future work on DMD any time soon.

Let me reiterate: You are insisting on doing something that most open source projects don't require, including a number of successful, company-backed ones. One of them is LLVM, and while Apple's legal department is known to be extremely careful, they seem to have no problem with betting a lot of money on that. Our code is Boost-licensed, and in similar fashion the lawyers of Adobe and a number of other companies are willing to bet some serious money on the fact that it holds. Requiring copyright assignment is certainly not the norm, and recently, a number of companies with a less altruistic agenda than the current-day Digital Mars have ditched their CLAs that didn't even require copyright assignment because they still found it to be an unnecessary stumbling block for new contributors (see e.g. [6|, [7]). Yet, you are expecting us to agree to a proposition where we can only be certain about two things: That we are not gaining any rights in the process, and that it is going to turn users and contributors away in the future.

What you are doing right now is akin to being afraid of the possibility that you might have developed cancer, and asking a doctor for radiation treatments and chemotherapy in response to your unsubstantiated fears. Sure, there is a non-zero possibility that you indeed have a tumor and it will save your life. But clearly, anybody acting in that fashion would be insane because they'd completely ignore the very real chance that they might die from the side-effects of the treatment.

There are many other issues that threaten D's future in much more serious ways than some hypothetical nondescript legal issues down the road because we didn't require copyright assignment. One of them is patent-encumbered code entering DMD, an issue where copyright assignment doesn't help you at all.

And yes, even the likelihood of D getting forked over the discussion we are having now is orders of magnitude larger than what you are trying to prevent.

David



[1] There seems to be dispute about whether this is actually true, and indeed there have been suits regarding Linux and Busybox, both of which don't require assignment.
[2] https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/copyright-assignment.html
[3] http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/07/07/harmony-harmful.html
[4] http://www.chesnok.com/daily/2010/10/08/the-problems-with-copyright-re-assignment/
[5] http://sfconservancy.org/blog/2014/jun/09/do-not-need-cla/
[6] http://www.joyent.com/blog/broadening-node-js-contributions
[7] https://twitter.com/richardfontana/status/477320000881975296

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On 25 Jun 2014, at 0:55, Andrei Alexandrescu via dmd-internals wrote:
> What seems pointless to me is this long and protracted discussion around... around what? What or whom are we talking about protecting here? It's not a practical matter, and it's not a matter of principles. If protecting the copyright of one's work is high on one's list of priorities, OSS is not the best place to be.
>
> Crap has happened before, among reasonable people, and in ways that had not been predicted. We don't have money. We don't have lawyers. We don't want to spend time analyzing, projecting, estimating, or speculating. We want to keep things simple and save everybody involved complications while keeping everything as open as possible. This very discussion is a huge waste of time wanking over nothing. What the heck are we even _talking_ about, folks?

You know what's funny about this, Andrei?

I don't know whether you realize it or not, but your message could be used equally well _against_ requiring copyright assignment.

To put it another way, if you don't think it's worth the discussion, let's go the path of least resistance, to continue what we are doing and not require copyright assignment.

David
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On 6/24/14, 5:23 PM, David Nadlinger wrote:
> On 25 Jun 2014, at 0:55, Andrei Alexandrescu via dmd-internals wrote:
>> What seems pointless to me is this long and protracted discussion
>> around... around what? What or whom are we talking about protecting
>> here? It's not a practical matter, and it's not a matter of
>> principles. If protecting the copyright of one's work is high on one's
>> list of priorities, OSS is not the best place to be.
>>
>> Crap has happened before, among reasonable people, and in ways that
>> had not been predicted. We don't have money. We don't have lawyers. We
>> don't want to spend time analyzing, projecting, estimating, or
>> speculating. We want to keep things simple and save everybody involved
>> complications while keeping everything as open as possible. This very
>> discussion is a huge waste of time wanking over nothing. What the heck
>> are we even _talking_ about, folks?
>
> You know what's funny about this, Andrei?
>
> I don't know whether you realize it or not, but your message could be
> used equally well _against_ requiring copyright assignment.
>
> To put it another way, if you don't think it's worth the discussion,
> let's go the path of least resistance, to continue what we are doing and
> not require copyright assignment.

A fair point, but I see it a different way.

The creator, first implementer, and main contributor of the D programming language is asking for something that would make his life simpler and asks me for a bureaucracy token. It doesn't impact the usefulness of my work and doesn't take away credit for public work I do, and the person asking is about as candid as it could ever get.

I've done a lot "worse" in the past. All of my books are copyrighted by Addison-Wesley Longman. My name is on two patents owned by Facebook. Most articles I wrote are copyrighted by whoever published them. All of my videos are copyrighted by the respective organizations and events, some of which I believe are stereotypically evil corporations. All were a lot of hard work. Some of these were paid for, but most not. Had I started a debate like this with them, their lawyers would have probably ceased the collaboration and everybody would have been worse off, and most of all the "greater good". Being liberal about making my work available and letting credit reach me instead of obsessing over it may as well be the best policy I've held throughout my career.

Now am I to self-righteously argue with Walter Bright just because he's more accessible and doesn't have lawyers to slice and dice things for him? I wouldn't find that an honorable thing to do.

I'm out of this discussion. I'll let Walter decide. If he decides to forgo potential contributions from people afraid he'll steal their work, so be it.


Andrei
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On 6/24/2014 5:19 PM, David Nadlinger wrote:
>
>    C.6) You wrote earlier that "the credit has a lot of value to one's professional career", and I couldn't agree more. Yet at the same time, you are asking people for the permission to take it away from them. Regardless of whether you actually intend to do that or not, the simple possibility makes this a rude thing to do without a good reason.
>


I find this discussion rather exhausting. But I want to respond strongly to this point. The CA simply does not take credit away from a contributor. Copyright status has nothing to do with who did the work. For example, a book author assigns copyright to the publisher, but nobody imagines that the publisher wrote the book.

Most companies do attempt to hide from the outside world who did what. But this project is not like that. We use github, and GIVING CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE is one of the primary motivators for that. In fact, the source code to DMD does not break out who did what lines of code and is entitled to credit, so even with no CA, you'd STILL have to examine github to see what's what.

I'm proud that we're using github which enables ALL contributors to get public credit for their work, automatically. Copyright status neither adds nor subtracts from that.

I'm not asking for CA for phobos, because I think that any issues can be worked around, i.e. the modules are replaceable. This is not so true of DMDFE. Trying to unwind a major contributor's work is a completely daunting task. I don't want to ever be faced with such a disaster. I don't have a well-financed phalanx of lawyers to bulldoze past such problems. And would the OTHER contributors to DMD care to have their good work made useless because one other contributor is no longer willing or available to give their consent to a change? The worst thing that could happen to DMD contributors is to have their work abandoned. Me, I don't want to expend my life doing things that would be abandoned, and I expect other open source contributors to feel the same way.

As I recall, there were 5 authors of Tango XML. 4 agreed to change the license, one refused. The 4 got their work thrown away because it was inextricably intermingled with the 5th. I don't want that to happen to DMD contributors.

When the Boost license is used, one essentially has already agreed to give up their rights to the code. What right is being usefully retained by not doing the CA? If someone has a real issue with that, I am more than willing to talk with them and see if a resolution can be found.

If anyone is still unsure of my intentions, recall that I repeatedly offered to the Tango team that I granted permission to them to use ANY of my D code, and they could relicense their fork of it as they saw fit. I did not oblige them to reciprocate, and they did not, but I'd still do it again.
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2014-06-24 18:46 GMT-07:00 Andrei Alexandrescu via dmd-internals < dmd-internals@puremagic.com>:
>
> I've done a lot "worse" in the past. All of my books are copyrighted by Addison-Wesley Longman. My name is on two patents owned by Facebook. Most articles I wrote are copyrighted by whoever published them. All of my videos are copyrighted by the respective organizations and events, some of which I believe are stereotypically evil corporations. All were a lot of hard work. Some of these were paid for, but most not. Had I started a debate like this with them, their lawyers would have probably ceased the collaboration and everybody would have been worse off, and most of all the "greater good". Being liberal about making my work available and letting credit reach me instead of obsessing over it may as well be the best policy I've held throughout my career.
>

Everything you mentioned is common practice. Giving CA for OSS code to a
non-public, one man organization is not.
I think everyone interested in D, even the most modest contributors like
myself, have faith in Walter's good intentions, and from my understanding
nobody challenged him on that, but rather exposed his argument of the
potential disappearing contributor under a new light.

I would myself, if I were to make a contribution to DMD, apply to any CA, but I don't support it. As David outlined in his brief email, you are trying to shield D against an issue that has the same probability than a Tsunami in Colorado. Would Boost be challenged by a judge, and no re-licensing option be available, this would be a major disaster for the whole OSS community, as well as countless companies. Now, trying to prevent this, while pointless, would probably be okay for most people it didn't add restrictions and prevent some contributions from new contributors, external code, contributors from companies...


I'm out of this discussion. I'll let Walter decide. If he decides to forgo
> potential contributions from people afraid he'll steal their work, so be it.
>
> If we didn't reach a mutual understanding at this point, I don't see us
reaching in a near future, so that's probably the best thing to do, unless Walter wants to continue this debate.

On 6/24/14, 9:37 PM, Mathias Lang wrote:
> 2014-06-24 18:46 GMT-07:00 Andrei Alexandrescu via dmd-internals
> <dmd-internals@puremagic.com <mailto:dmd-internals@puremagic.com>>:
>
>     I've done a lot "worse" in the past. All of my books are copyrighted
>     by Addison-Wesley Longman. My name is on two patents owned by
>     Facebook. Most articles I wrote are copyrighted by whoever published
>     them. All of my videos are copyrighted by the respective
>     organizations and events, some of which I believe are
>     stereotypically evil corporations. All were a lot of hard work. Some
>     of these were paid for, but most not. Had I started a debate like
>     this with them, their lawyers would have probably ceased the
>     collaboration and everybody would have been worse off, and most of
>     all the "greater good". Being liberal about making my work available
>     and letting credit reach me instead of obsessing over it may as well
>     be the best policy I've held throughout my career.
>
>
> Everything you mentioned is common practice.

You don't know what you're talking about. I mean this literally, not sarcastically. There is no common practice; ten organizations have eleven ways of dealing with copyright assignment. I've signed dozens, maybe a couple hundreds of contracts. There are no two identical ones, and most are not similar. Some have a work order. Some call it a Statement of Work. Some don't have either. Some contracts are carefully-thought 50-page contracts. My last gig with NDC had no contract and no SoW at all, and the copyright release form was half a page that probably a law student could overthrow. It was for good money, too, all through a handshake agreement. And so on and so forth. There really is no common practice.

> Giving CA for OSS code to a
> non-public, one man organization is not.

The one good outcome of this discussion I see here is considering succession, i.e. what happens if Walter dies. As unpleasant as it is for everybody to think of that, probably we need to get that taken care of.


Andrei
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On 25 June 2014 08:20, Andrei Alexandrescu via dmd-internals <dmd-internals@puremagic.com> wrote:
> On 6/24/14, 9:37 PM, Mathias Lang wrote:
>>
>> Giving CA for OSS code to a
>> non-public, one man organization is not.
>
>
> The one good outcome of this discussion I see here is considering succession, i.e. what happens if Walter dies. As unpleasant as it is for everybody to think of that, probably we need to get that taken care of.
>

To start with, what will happen with the Symantec backend?  I assume whatever agreement Walter may have with them only extends as far as himself.

Regards
Iain.
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Andrei Alexandrescu via dmd-internals, el 24 de June a las 18:46 me escribiste:
> On 6/24/14, 5:23 PM, David Nadlinger wrote:
> >On 25 Jun 2014, at 0:55, Andrei Alexandrescu via dmd-internals wrote:
> >>What seems pointless to me is this long and protracted discussion around... around what? What or whom are we talking about protecting here? It's not a practical matter, and it's not a matter of principles. If protecting the copyright of one's work is high on one's list of priorities, OSS is not the best place to be.
> >>
> >>Crap has happened before, among reasonable people, and in ways that had not been predicted. We don't have money. We don't have lawyers. We don't want to spend time analyzing, projecting, estimating, or speculating. We want to keep things simple and save everybody involved complications while keeping everything as open as possible. This very discussion is a huge waste of time wanking over nothing. What the heck are we even _talking_ about, folks?
> >
> >You know what's funny about this, Andrei?
> >
> >I don't know whether you realize it or not, but your message could be used equally well _against_ requiring copyright assignment.
> >
> >To put it another way, if you don't think it's worth the discussion, let's go the path of least resistance, to continue what we are doing and not require copyright assignment.
> 
> A fair point, but I see it a different way.
> 
> The creator, first implementer, and main contributor of the D programming language is asking for something that would make his life simpler and asks me for a bureaucracy token.

Why? I still don't get it. All the rest makes no sense at all unless you can answer that question.

> It doesn't impact the usefulness of my work and doesn't take away credit for public work I do, and the person asking is about as candid as it could ever get.
> 
> I've done a lot "worse" in the past. All of my books are copyrighted by Addison-Wesley Longman. My name is on two patents owned by Facebook. Most articles I wrote are copyrighted by whoever published them. All of my videos are copyrighted by the respective organizations and events, some of which I believe are stereotypically evil corporations. All were a lot of hard work. Some of these were paid for, but most not. Had I started a debate like this with them, their lawyers would have probably ceased the collaboration and everybody would have been worse off, and most of all the "greater good". Being liberal about making my work available and letting credit reach me instead of obsessing over it may as well be the best policy I've held throughout my career.
> 
> Now am I to self-righteously argue with Walter Bright just because he's more accessible and doesn't have lawyers to slice and dice things for him? I wouldn't find that an honorable thing to do.
> 
> I'm out of this discussion. I'll let Walter decide. If he decides to forgo potential contributions from people afraid he'll steal their work, so be it.
> 
> 
> Andrei
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-- 
Leandro Lucarella (AKA luca)                     http://llucax.com.ar/
----------------------------------------------------------------------
El techo de mi cuarto lleno de planetas
Y mi mente es un planeta más
Donde vivo yo y nadie podrá entrar
Jamás
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