[dmd-internals] DMD copyright assignment

[Andrei Alexandrescu via dmd-internals]

On 6/24/14, 9:37 PM, Mathias Lang wrote:
> 2014-06-24 18:46 GMT-07:00 Andrei Alexandrescu via dmd-internals
> <dmd-internals at puremagic.com <mailto:dmd-internals at puremagic.com>>:
>
>     I've done a lot "worse" in the past. All of my books are copyrighted
>     by Addison-Wesley Longman. My name is on two patents owned by
>     Facebook. Most articles I wrote are copyrighted by whoever published
>     them. All of my videos are copyrighted by the respective
>     organizations and events, some of which I believe are
>     stereotypically evil corporations. All were a lot of hard work. Some
>     of these were paid for, but most not. Had I started a debate like
>     this with them, their lawyers would have probably ceased the
>     collaboration and everybody would have been worse off, and most of
>     all the "greater good". Being liberal about making my work available
>     and letting credit reach me instead of obsessing over it may as well
>     be the best policy I've held throughout my career.
>
>
> Everything you mentioned is common practice.

You don't know what you're talking about. I mean this literally, not 
sarcastically. There is no common practice; ten organizations have 
eleven ways of dealing with copyright assignment. I've signed dozens, 
maybe a couple hundreds of contracts. There are no two identical ones, 
and most are not similar. Some have a work order. Some call it a 
Statement of Work. Some don't have either. Some contracts are 
carefully-thought 50-page contracts. My last gig with NDC had no 
contract and no SoW at all, and the copyright release form was half a 
page that probably a law student could overthrow. It was for good money, 
too, all through a handshake agreement. And so on and so forth. There 
really is no common practice.

> Giving CA for OSS code to a
> non-public, one man organization is not.

The one good outcome of this discussion I see here is considering 
succession, i.e. what happens if Walter dies. As unpleasant as it is for 
everybody to think of that, probably we need to get that taken care of.


Andrei