On 29/12/2024 16:20, Björn Bidar wrote: Patrick Fitzgerald <patrickf@i-layer.com> writes: some clarifications On 23/12/2024 11:21, Dominik George wrote: Hi, Many packages contain "Copyright (c) {{ year }} SUSE LLC" . The vim .spec template, spec-cleaner and the corresponding source service update this regularly. They also update the copyright year to the current year unless the right parameters are passed, and even so if no people employed by SUSE LLC are involved. My original packages contain my own copyright. As a contributor I am happy to license my works to anyone, including SUSE LLC, under an open source license. What I am not doing is assign exclusive ownership to SUSE LLC, neither for my original packages nor for my contributions. I believe this is in the spirit of FLOSS. We should clarify the obvious: assigning exclusive copyright to SUSE LLC is not a requirement for contribution for openSUSE, the text makes that clear. But there is no single best way to reflect that, and who owns what, if "SUSE LLC" keeps getting added, automatically, at the top (!), while we reject contributors adding their own. You can reject such submissions, what what message are we sending to openSUSE contributors that are not bound to assign their work to the company? SUSE LLC being listed as sole copyright holder is one point stopping me from actively contributing or largely promoting openSUSE distributions (in addition to the project's insistance in promoting Google and Microsoft platforms). Also keep in mind that copyright assignment to a company, or replacing copyright holders with a company name, is outright illegal if the original author is a German citizen. -nik I doubt that "outright illegal" is true.. It depends on the agreements made between the original author and others - including companies. For example if you are employed by a company then you may need to check your employment contract - it may stipulated there that copyrighted works are automatically assigned. (Look to any music company to see that kind of behaviour.) A company/organisation possesses, legally speaking, the same rights as a person; they can be taxed, sued and bankrupted, so they can hold patents and copyrights. Having said that, yes, to transfer the copyright to /anyone - /without the permission of the original author, is mostly likely illegal. I say mostly, because it might be transferred in the case of bankruptcy of the owner because it is an asset. In any case it depends on agreements that have been reached. One thing to be aware of though, is that assigning copyright/patents/trademarks to "openSUSE" is pointless because at the moment, "openSUSE" is neither a person or a company/organisation. It is simply a trademark of SUSE, and has no legal status. This is why the Geeko Foundation exists - to provide a legal entity for the community to rally behind. Note this view is IMHO quite Brit/US centric. As a German I don't feel a organization outside of Europe could represent me as a developer/user. In the context of copyright it is also not helpful that these are to centered towards the angloamerican world. What the name openSUSE means as a brand seems to be also much different outside of Europe, but that's off-topic. I suspect that you wouldn't feel represented by any organisation outside of Germany? Indeed every country has its own copyright laws, though they are broadly similar in scope. But my point though is that assigning copyright to openSUSE (mentioned earlier in this thread) is pointless as "openSUSE" has no basis to "hold" copyright, as it is not a person or legal association, legally speaking. Anywhere in the world. Genuine question: when the UK was part of the EU, how would you have thought about this topic then? (just curious) Obviously a macro assigning a copyright to a third party is... questionable, unless there are is an agreement in place. (ie a checkbox on every build "by using OBS you agree to SUSE Inc being joint copyright holder") IMHO this process should be manual. The format_spec service should not override copyright but warn if there's no copyright and point the developer towards the wikit to change accordingly. Don't automate something which is better done in a manual process, copyright is one of these things. My point exactly re automation - I agree. But another genuine question, why is this better done manually? For my self I don't care much. However I would prefer to assign the copyright to SUSE GmbH than SUSE LLC. And what if as an independent developer you wanted to retain copyright yourself of something you have authored, but gets built by OBS? If possible the license specifiers and file-copyright-text should use SPDX tags. --