Hello Stefan,
Thank you for your feedback.
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.
Yes, and I take this opportunity to also thank you for the great contrib you did too.
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.
Actually, my preferred solution is the public domain for small contributions to the framework or the official modules.
I think it's very boring to ask people to sign a document and send us by fax/mail just because they contributed a few lines of code -> doing contracts with community members is not the way I see a good collaboration (this was the reason why we did not made it before: we supposed that if a contributor did not put a copyright in his code, merge proposal or patch, it is considered public domain)
But I understand some may prefer a contributor agreement. If some wants a contributor agreement, I propose to use the one of the FSFE. Does anybody have any bad feedback about this contributor agreement ?
So, my question is: is it ok for you to put contributions to the framework or official addons in the public domain or you prefer a contributor agreement ? (of course, your own modules should be under your own copyright)
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.
OpenERP SA will not be sold to third parties, I own a significant part of the shares to ensure that. The biggest risk for OpenERP SA is not to be sold but to fail building a profitable business model allowing to sustain the fast evolution of the OpenERP product. In that case OpenERP may finish like GNUe, adempiere, ... in a few years. That would be the worst scenario in my opinion.
But even if it is (suppose I die in an accident), it does not change the fact that OpenERP is currently under AGPLv3. Nobody can change this.
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.
By doing that, you may have the invert effect than what you expect:
* the more people are involved in a decision, the less chances you have to make the evolution -> if 50% of the contributors have to agree to change from AGPLv3 to a potential AGPLv4, you have a risk that you can never upgrade. I would never take this risks for OpenERP
* I don't imaging starting a discussion to define the status of such an organisation. It would be a long debate and we all have more important things to do than legal researches, discussion on status, official meetings and votes, ...
* just imagine the questions you have to cover in the status:
- who can join ? --> those that commit more than 1% of the lines of code (then there would be only OpenERP) ? what do you do if a lot of devs from microsoft that contribute and join the association ?
- how do you take take desisions ? 80% of votes according to the importance of the contributor based on the lines of code --> then only OpenERP sa can take the decisions.
- who will pay the costs of the organization ? what will be the budget and forecasted costs ? how can the association enforce the protection of the license in a court ? --> this can quickly costs more than 100k$
- what's the responsibilities of the organization ? it is logic that the one who get the copyright ensure the evolution of his code.
- if the association decide to remove the "private use" clause of OpenERP Enterprise, who will pay my developers that are partly financed by this ? If nobody, who will ensure OpenERP will grow quickly in the future.
As a summary, we clearly all have more important things to do than this. I don't want OpenERP community to enter in such debates, it's a waste of time.
What do you think about putting all small contributions to official modules and framework in the public domain ? this is the best solution as it does not require a copyright assignment (to OpenERP SA or to an association).
This solution is also very fair as a contributor can apply a special licence for his own code (that he may use in others softwares) and we can put his code in the core without having to ask a contributor agreement signature. We protect both the unity of OpenERP and the personnal contrib of each one.
