Re: Icon designer wanted (Aquamacs Emacs)

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

David Reitter <david.reitter@gmail.com> writes:

> On 6 Jan 2006, at 12:40, Lennart Borgman wrote:
>
>> david.reitter@gmail.com wrote:
>>
>>> I know that certain "qualified signatures" (e.g. via X.509 cert,
>>> signed
>>> by a "trusted party", i.e. Thawte/Verisign etc.) do have legally
>>> binding status in some legislations at this point. I wonder if these
>>> things can be be used to sign code including a contract that contains
>>> the same stuff that we need to sign when contributing to GNU
>>> projects.
>>> If we can get the "paper" out of "paperwork", things would suddenly
>>> become much more manageable.
>>>
>> Maybe that is a good idea, but it is actually very easy to sign the
>> papers for Emacs contributions.
>
> The difference is that you have to actively decide to contribute, or
> at least (rare case) being specifically asked. If people signed
> their code with such a legally binding signature, it could be used
> freely by anyone, for any compatible project.

Uh, that is called "public domain".  It is possible to relinquish code
into the public domain where it is free for the taking for everyone.
Doing it in a legally sound manner is quite a bit of work.  The
copyright assignment to the FSF has the advantage that the soundness
is taken care of by the FSF.

Anyway, what you are thinking of is pretty much useless: the FSF is
interested in the paperwork in order to have a party responsible for
damages.  You can't hold somebody responsible for damages if you have
not even entered into any contract with him.  So if somebody steals
and disassembles some software from Microsoft and signs it with his
key and it gets put into Emacs, then Microsoft can sue the FSF for
damages and relief, and the person can get sued for Microsoft, but the
FSF can't reclaim the damages that it had because of the mistaken
assumption that the person was actually signing stuff which he had
rights to.  And this person can't be held responsible by the people
_profiting_ from his illegal contribution, but merely by the actual
author of the indicted code, and any parties to which he actively
engaged in an exchange.

The copyright assignment procedure means that the contributors to the
FSF copyrighted software are actual contractual partners.

Again, you can also check with a lawyer what it takes to put something
reliable into the public domain.  This does also benefit people who
want to integrate this into proprietary software (something which the
FSF and the GPL don't want to support), and then it becomes your own
responsibility to get everything right.

The procedure with the FSF, in contrast, is remarkably simple to do,
it incurs no costs for you, and you have just a single party to which
you are responsible.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum