The installer for the labscript suite. This repository is used used to build zip files containing an install script and all the labscript suite python packages.
Without having signed contribution agreements, copyright law says that contributors retain copyright over their contributions, so long as they are not 'minor' contributions, where the line between minor and major is a little blurry.
This means that major feature implementations and other non-minor work belongs to the contributor, and unless the contributors say otherwise, they are licensing their contributions under BSD 2 clause, since this is at the top level of the project and all files. Since BSD is super permissive, this is no hinderance, and we can relicense as we see fit so long as any new license is compatible with BSD 2 clause.
Nonetheless I see many files in the labscript suite have incorrect copyright assignment, either assigning to the institution of the contributor, or to Monash University. Unless copyright has been officially signed over to an institution, this should be changed to the names of the contributors.
Version control history should be examined to assign copyright to the contributors.
In fact, even though the core developers assigned copyright to Monash University and therefore Monash owns the IP of the names and architecture and all the code at the time of copyright assignment, all work done by the core developers since is their own. So the core developers are no exception, and files will need to marked 'copyright Monash University, Philip Starkey, Chris Billington, etc", or more likely relegated to a separate file in each project.
The fact that we have not labelled copyright correctly does not change the facts of who owns what code - if it were not labelled at all, it's still the case that contributors own their code. But we should label it correctly, if we are going to label it at all.
Should take direction from large open source projects to see how they go about this. It may be uncommon practice to actually label every file, and a list of names in the LICENSE file of each project might be sufficient. Will see.
Original report (archived issue) by Chris Billington (Bitbucket: cbillington, GitHub: chrisjbillington).
Without having signed contribution agreements, copyright law says that contributors retain copyright over their contributions, so long as they are not 'minor' contributions, where the line between minor and major is a little blurry.
This means that major feature implementations and other non-minor work belongs to the contributor, and unless the contributors say otherwise, they are licensing their contributions under BSD 2 clause, since this is at the top level of the project and all files. Since BSD is super permissive, this is no hinderance, and we can relicense as we see fit so long as any new license is compatible with BSD 2 clause.
Nonetheless I see many files in the labscript suite have incorrect copyright assignment, either assigning to the institution of the contributor, or to Monash University. Unless copyright has been officially signed over to an institution, this should be changed to the names of the contributors.
Version control history should be examined to assign copyright to the contributors.
In fact, even though the core developers assigned copyright to Monash University and therefore Monash owns the IP of the names and architecture and all the code at the time of copyright assignment, all work done by the core developers since is their own. So the core developers are no exception, and files will need to marked 'copyright Monash University, Philip Starkey, Chris Billington, etc", or more likely relegated to a separate file in each project.
The fact that we have not labelled copyright correctly does not change the facts of who owns what code - if it were not labelled at all, it's still the case that contributors own their code. But we should label it correctly, if we are going to label it at all.
Should take direction from large open source projects to see how they go about this. It may be uncommon practice to actually label every file, and a list of names in the LICENSE file of each project might be sufficient. Will see.