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Hi Fabien,thank you for your passionate reaction. I believe that you share the same passion for Open Source software and the OpenERP products in particular as we do. We agree with you that OpenERP SA is 'not just a commercial entity' and it has been doing a wonderful job building great open source products. There is nothing wrong with commercial entities in that respect and we rather enjoy being in one ourselves.
I propose to keep things simple. You do what you prefer for your own code;
- you contribute to the core and accept to put in the public domain
or give your copyright agreement (following the FSFE one)
- or you do your improve in your own branch and we can not merge it
in the trunk in order to protect the future of OpenERP.
It is vital for us to contribute to the OpenERP framework and the core modules, so we would always prefer the option of copyright assignment in a contributor agreement. You raise a number of valid issues with regards to protecting the OpenERP products against copyright violations and other problems which argue in favour of such copyright assignment. I do not think that anyone can argue against them, and it is for such reasons that projects like Plone and KDE may ask for copyright assignment in a contributor agreement.
However, the problem is that assigning copyrights to a commercial entity does not always help when the issues that you mention occur. We know you personally to be a great proponent of Open Source but your successor or your creditors may not. OpenERP SA may be sold to a different party, or take up a very different attitude for some other reason. When that happens, and OpenERP SA has all the copyrights, we will never be able to update the license to protect the OpenERP products or enforce the licenses in court.
If we follow best practices in open source, then we set up a non-profit membership organisation as in the case of Plone and KDE, for contributors to assign their copyrights to. The FSFE/KDE agreement [1] would be perfect for that.
Since we share the same passion and many more with us, we should proceed to take the next step and set up the membership foundation to protect the future of the OpenERP products.
On behalf of Therp, Stefan Rijnhart [1] http://ev.kde.org/rules/fla.php -- Therp - Maatwerk in open ontwikkeling Stefan Rijnhart - Ontwerp en implementatie mail: stefan@xxxxxxxx tel: +31 (0) 614478606 web: http://therp.nl
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