Copyright for NUnit Projects

CharliePoole commented 7 years ago

A bunch of NUnit projects are copyright to me personally. A bunch of others are not, but just had my name added to them in a kind of rote way as "the guy" for holding copyrights.

I need to figure out what to do with "my" copyrights, but the ones that just have my name artificially added to them kind of confuse the issue. Let's discuss how to fix all this.

I'll add separate comments for each sort of project.

rprouse commented 7 years ago

Personally, I'll stick with the spelling of the people that invented the language and try not to be overly influenced by my neighbors to the south 😄

jnm2 commented 7 years ago

The footers in these sections say, Copyright (c) 2016 NUnit Software: https://github.com/nunit/docs/wiki/NUnit-Xamarin-Runners https://github.com/nunit/docs/wiki/Visual-Studio-Test-Generator https://github.com/CharliePoole/nunit-project-editor/wiki/Project-Editor (says 2017)

https://github.com/nunit/docs/wiki/Visual-Studio-Test-Adapter has no footer.

What would you like to do?

Awhile back I had changed the footer under https://github.com/nunit/docs/wiki/NUnit-Documentation to look better, from:

                      Copyright (c) 2016 NUnit Software

To:

But the footer edit is buggy and always edits the https://github.com/nunit/docs/wiki/NUnit-Documentation footer for some reason. I think we'll have to clone locally to update them.

CharliePoole commented 7 years ago

There is a list of things that may not be done (successfully) online in the wiki. Off the top of my head...

Creating a new page
Editing a sidebar
Editing a footer

This all goes back to the fact that the wiki engine treats the hierarchy of pages as if it were a flat list.

CharliePoole commented 7 years ago

Unfortunately, this is well known to some of us and we haven't made a point of telling people until after they get it wrong. 😈

CharliePoole commented 7 years ago

Regarding different footers in different sections, i think you should leave them to the people responsible for those sections.

CharliePoole commented 7 years ago

AFAIK all the details are done for this issue and what remains is a document to be written. I'm postponing working on it until I return but if somebody else decides to take it up I'm OK with that too.

CharliePoole commented 6 years ago

I'm taking my name off this. I'm not sure if we still need a document or if we do what would go into it.

ChrisMaddock commented 6 years ago

I'm not sure we have anything to write in a document either, and I'm not a fan of making up rules in case we need them in the future.

I suggest we close this issue, and deal with and copyright conflicts as/when/if they arise.

CharliePoole commented 6 years ago

I guess I created it, so I'll close it.

CharliePoole commented 6 years ago

As noted above, I closed this because nobody wanted to continue it and I felt I had been doing it as the chair of the @nunit/core-team so it wasn't my place for me to continue once @rprouse began to fill that role. This seems to be a bit of a problem, however, since we do not actually have a document that says (1) who holds copyright to what (2) how they got that copyright and (3) what to do about copyright when new projects or documentation get added.

There's no doubt that I'm an outlier in terms of how much attention I think should be paid to copyright. I think it's super important to us because copyright law is the engine that drives Open Source. It's only because we hold copyright to something that we have the power to decide who uses it and how. As I'm sure you all know, putting stuff into the public domain doesn't do that.

I'm writing this comment on the closed issue, but we could open a new issue if everyone prefers that. The specific thing that caused me to write that is that I just noticed that the legacy NUnit documents on the web site are shown as Copyright to myself and Rob, which is not what I thought we had decided. Looking at the discussion under this issue, it seems as if we decided it should be to the "NUnit Project."

Taking it a step further, I have never actually done anything to transfer my rights to the NUnit Project or (in the case of software) to Rob or Terje. We just changed the words in the files, which I suspect is insufficient. My memory (I can't find this documented so it may have been private discussion) is that we intended to wait until we had .NET Foundation support and possibly legal advice in order to resolve this.

I don't know if we are yet at that point or, if so, who the proper contact is on the Foundation side as well as our side - although I've been assuming that Rob is the sole point of contact for us in general.

Please comment about your memories of how we intended to handle the specific item (documentation) and what you think we need to do going forward.

ChrisMaddock commented 6 years ago

My (vague) memories are that we planned to move copyright to Rob/Terje as an interim measure, until we were set up with the .NET foundation - to ensure the foundation joining process wasn’t blocking your ‘handover list’, Charlie. I’d assumed that changing the licence was all that was needed to handover (I am not a lawyer) - if there’s more, then I think we should do that.

On docs - it looks like Joseph was in the process of renaming to NUnit Project, until you suggested it should be the responsibility of whoever owns the docs in https://github.com/nunit/governance/issues/12#issuecomment-311858265. Looks like the thread got lost there.

How do we get that moving again, is it just a matter of Rob and Terje giving the ok to update the copyrights? Who currently has holds copyright on the docs?

CharliePoole commented 6 years ago

My thinking on the legal stuff is that 99.9% of us programmers won't care one way or another, but that somebody in that 0.1% might find a loophole that allowed them to tie things up in a way that could be detrimental to NUnit. I'd like to make that impossible, even if it's tedious.

Regarding my comment that you linked, it refers to who should make the changes in each section of the wiki not what the content of the footers should be. I thought the Core Team was doing that. The reason it has to be section by section, of course, is that someone could contribute a project to which he wanted to retain copyright to the docs, just as I originally did for NUnit, releasing the software but not the docs as open source.

My original question, however, was about the docs section of the website, which contains the legacy documentation. Those are the docs that were always in my name and were never open source before. That is, they all said "Copyright Charlie Poole,. All Rights reserved." I was and am willing to release them more publicly, but that's not what the docs footer says on the site.

To get it moving again, I feel like we need some document that states who has the copyright to each thing and that each project should follow that. If that's not done, then we should just take each item on a case by case basis and figure it out - I hope starting with the issue I'm raising.

ChrisMaddock commented 6 years ago

Sorry, I’d missed you said ‘legacy’ docs.

rprouse commented 6 years ago

@CharliePoole I thought that we had agreed to CC-NC-SA for the legacy docs with the Non-Commercial being at your request, but I may be wrong. I also cannot find that email, issue or document. I probably mistook docs in this discussion to mean all docs, legacy and NUnit 3 since the NUnit 3 docs derive from the legacy docs.

Since you hold the copyright, I think it is appropriate that you decide how the legacy docs should be treated. If you don't feel that CC-NC-SA is appropriate, we will need to decide how that is represented on the website since the standard footer is CC-NC-SA.

My tendency is open by default and that is why most of what I do is MIT license, but I am also a strong advocate for copyright where appropriate, so I am fine with whatever you decide.

CharliePoole commented 6 years ago

@rprouse Although I'm sure you know this, for the benefit of the entire team I need to state...

You can't release something under an open source license (or any license) unless you hold the copyright or somebody else who holds the copyright licenses you to do so.

So copyright and open source are not opposed, they go hand in hand. If the team or somebody on the team doesn't hold copyright, then you can't (among other things)

release the docs or software
challenge somebody else who makes improper use of the software.
change the license under which you release the software
give special "deals" to somebody to make use of the documentation or software

The CC-BY-NC-SA (I think that's what the website says) is exactly what I would choose.

I don't have any memory of deciding to include you as a copyright holder. If you remember it, please prompt me about what the reasons were. Was it related to not wanting to use the name of a non-existent entity on the docs? That may make some sense as it would allow you to do all of the things listed above in case something happened to me.

BTW I hope it's entirely obvious that it has nothing to do with your level of contribution, deservedness, etc. For me it's about how future decisions get made. If it were possible to make the "Core Team" (present and future) the holder of the copyright, that's what I'd want to do. Maybe those .NET Foundation lawyers will have something to say about that.

CharliePoole commented 4 years ago

We discussed this from January 2017 to June 2018 and then stopped. There has been no discussion for the past two years. I had closed it at one point, believing it was done, but it was re-opened. Is there something that still is needed?

ChrisMaddock commented 3 years ago

Whatever we discussed in the past, I think our current position is stable. How about we close this, and create a new issue if there's anything we want to change here in the future?

I reopened it 2 years ago, so I'll go ahead and close it now. Feel free to reopen if anyone disagrees.

nunit / governance

Copyright for NUnit Projects #12