kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Dick Hollenbeck <dick@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 09/28/2011 03:28 AM, Martijn Kuipers wrote:
> Hi Dick,
>
> This is not my fight. I almost was typing in a reply, but I think it is in KiCads' best interest to not begin a quarrel.
> I just wanted to note a few things:
> - I agree, we disagree on almost all points and as my comments did not convince you otherwise, neither did yours.
> - I agree when you are right saying you are a major shareholder and as I told you I do appreciate the efforts put into KiCad by you and everyone else.
>
> So it seems we can reach some form of agreement. A dutch saying goes like this: "Hoge bomen vangen veel wind". Since I doubt google will give an accurate translating, and I am unaware (at least at the moment) of the English equivalent, you can roughly translate this to: "Those who step forward and put in a lot of effort are most likely to receive criticism".  It does not state whether that is fair or not.
>
> Sincerely yours,
> Martijn
>


We live in a complex world, and the kinds of people we have on this team are rare in
society today.

The perspective I hold on ownership is best understood in the following way.  The project
consists of both tangible and intangible assets.  My understanding of the ownership issue
is most easily supported if we look at only tangible assets for the time being.

The tangible work products have copyright holders.  Copyright law recognizes copyright
holders as owners.  Without the copyright holder, there is no foundation on which to park
the GPL license.  There is no need for a license unless there is one or more copyright
owner.  Lack of ownership means public domain.  Public domain would mean no owners, and no
basis for any license whatsoever.

We are not assigning ownership in this project to a recipient entity.  Copyrights are held
by the original authors, who share jointly the ownership.  Ownership is the only way to
make the GPL work, or any license for that matter.  In our case, the other significant
attribute of the project is that we are not assigning that copyright ownership to a
recipient entity.  Admittedly, it is not possible to accurately attribute ownership to
each partner or shareholder down to a 3 significant digit percentage.  That is why we have
to remain respectful, act like professionals, and not flaunt this ownership issue on a day
to day basis.  However, in fact, it does exist.