Is dbus 1.2.1 version stable?

[Thiago Macieira]

On Monday 28 April 2008 12:32:58 Rob Taylor wrote:
> Thiago Macieira wrote:
> > On Sunday 27 April 2008 18:02:49 John (J5) Palmieri wrote:
> >> Because one of the original contributing companies (Code Factory)
> >> silently went bankrupt and their contract did not include copyright
> >> assignment according to the company that hired them.  Their assets were
> >> sold off and tracking it down is a hard task.  Feel free to do some
> >> detective work on it.  The license is not a huge issue, just a point of
> >> confusion.  You can still release your code under MIT using the AFL
> >> license for D-Bus.  Most of the D-Bus code is MIT now.
> >
> > Just some more data: when a company is bankrupt and is liquidated, its
> > assets are sold off and are used to repay its debtholders and
> > shareholders. Without knowing the precise details of the liquidation, we
> > can't know where each asset ended up. (A wild guess, given the fact that
> > it was a small company, is that most if not all ended up with the debt
> > holders, a.k.a. banks)
> >
> > The intangible assets, such as copyright, may have been completely
> > ignored -- probably because they had an estimated value of $0. If they
> > *had* been sold, tracking who bought them would've been possible, albeit
> > extremely difficult. If they were not sold, how does it work then? Did it
> > get sold by $0 to any of the stakeholders? Or to all? Did the
> > stakeholders simply waive their rights to the copyrights?
> >
> > So you see how difficult this is. The best way out for us -- who are
> > hackers, not lawyers -- is to rewrite their code.
>
> An interesting point that a swede told me is that in Sweden (this may or
> may not be correct..), you can't transfer copyright ownership, only
> license it. So depending on the terms of employment of Andreas, it might
> be now within his rights to relicense the work.
>
> Maybe FSFE could help us out here?

They might. They have run into this non-transferability of copyright before, I 
am sure. They have helped us (the KDE e.V.) with the Fiduciary License 
Agreement, which is the equivalent of copyright transfer for regions where 
copyright cannot be transferred.

It means we license the code under such a license that allows licensee to 
relicense it under whatever sub-license he chooses (given certain 
pre-conditions)

But that's the case of copyright being owned by a person. I wonder what 
happens in the case of copyright being owned by a company. Since companies 
can be bought, it would transfer anyways. Last I checked, people couldn't be 
bought in Sweden :-) (or I'd have ordered a Swedish girl for me already; they 
must have abolished this Viking custom when they joined the EU...)

-- 
  Thiago Macieira  -  thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
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