Copyright notice referring a company other than Sun (original) (raw)

Phil Race Phil.Race at Sun.COM
Thu Jun 18 11:13:53 PDT 2009

Mark,

I think it likely matters to (say) commercial licensees who also get the JDK code to know that Sun has a copyright in the file, or even just use the binaries created from those sources, which is why I think we'd always want it to be present.

And I don't understand the apparent legal nuances of this :

they aren't granted the actual copyright, just a grant to the rights associated with it

-phil.

Mark Wielaard wrote:

On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 10:17 -0700, Phil Race wrote:

So whilst I'm not a lawyer, I'd say that means that all code contributed to OpenJDK under SCA can have a full Sun copyright - and probably should have that explicitly in the source file. Not just for the new portions, but for all of it.

Also not a lawyer, but I think you are right, if Sun would want that. But it would be enough for Sun to add their own copyright notice if they want to. And Sun is most likely not entitled to remove any existing copyright statements in contributions being done under the SCA since they aren't granted the actual copyright, just a grant to the rights associated with it (plus patent and moral rights). Meaning that the copyright itself stays with the contributor. This is different from other such agreements, which do assign copyright, like the FSF agreement. The SCA is just a shared rights agreement, not a copyright transfer/assignment. We could ask a lawyer of course. But for the public OpenJDK project it seems that, whatever the nitty-gritty legal details, it isn't a problem at all having multiple copyright notices. If you go through the sources you will note that there are lots and lots of additional copyright statements in the files next to Sun's copyright statements. In that respect it isn't really an issue for the public project (unlike what Sun does with their granted rights when not distributing the contributions under non-free terms and wanting to register any such rights). And that is a good thing, it tracks the different contributors and shares the glory a bit in public. IMHO. Cheers, Mark

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