I'm still on this list. You can remove me if you want, though. (If you're going to, please send me a

courtesy email to let me know when I've been bumped)

My advice is to define a clear goal. What are you trying to accomplish? Then, talk to your lawyers about

some practical steps you can take to get as close to this goal as you can. Your lawyers can help you

to determine what tradeoffs, if any, should be considered.

You might also want to ask your lawyers their opinion about how important they think this copyright

issue actually is. If it's very important, it might be worthwhile upsetting and potentially losing some

developers to fix it. If it isn't that important, then it might not be. Maybe there are some key areas that

you could straighten out more easily (like the Portage code itself) and then others you could at least

temporarily ignore due to their complexity. I'm thinking of the actual ebuilds being a very complex issue.

Which is more likely to be ripped off? This should all factor into your plan.

I have tried to tackle this issue in the past, and it is harder than it looks. I think I would have been more

successful if I had tried to straighten out copyrights for some key areas of Gentoo rather than try to tackle

everything at once. Ebuilds are particularly thorny because so many people have touched them.

If fixing all the ebuilds is an impossible goal, then maybe focus on the possible instead?

I hope you can find a good solution. If you're ever in need of any additional paperwork from me, please

On 6/27/05, Donnie Berkholz <spyderous@gentoo.org> wrote:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Deedra Waters wrote:
> I'd suggest the license. I suspect that as long as the terms are right,
> that people won't have problems with the license. Trying to maintain
> both a copyright, and a license would cause a lot of problems, and a
> copyright is much harder to handle since we would have to get anyone
> under 18 to get their parents to sign the thing etc etc etc.

People under 18 can't consent to a license any more than an assignment,
so I don't understand your last point. But yes, maintaining both would
be more work. The question is: Is it worth it?

Thanks,
Donnie
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFCwMO0XVaO67S1rtsRAk1BAKDgLzs1y0SOkNO2ThVfnMbs5nBEXwCgjFmv
ZQB0X4QB6xceRMVCzjggbxw=
=MyVE
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
--
gentoo-trustees@gentoo.org mailing list