[Xesam] [nepomuk-kde] Nepomuk/Desktop/Shared ontologies - svn layout as discussed at the GCDS last week

[Leo Sauermann]

It was Sebastian Trüg who said at the right time 17.07.2009 09:33 the 
following words:
> On Thursday 16 July 2009 17:47:29 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
>   
>> On Monday 13 July 2009 16:10:31 Sebastian Trüg wrote:
>>     
>>> * Copyright: none of the files contain a copyright header atm. We need to
>>>   settle on the licence and then add a header to all files. Also atm the
>>>   documentation stated that the ontos are (C) Nepomuk consortium which
>>> does not exist anymore. Question is: who is it now?
>>>       
>> Do you need legal advice? A code license such as LGPL or so might not be
>> what we want, and changing license at some later point will cause a lot of
>> headaches, so better be safe now ...
>>
>> Also note that copyright is different from the license, without knowing the
>> copyright holder(s), it's impossible to change a license. Probably a good
>> idea to add those anyway.
>>
>> So if legal advice on that is needed, the KDE e.V. can help providing this.
>> Let me know in that case...
>>     
>
> I would appreciate your help.
> So far we have only Leo's opinion on the licence issue and I cannot really 
> give a qualifies answer to his proposal. It would, thus, be great if you could 
> look at it.
>   
The copyright should be the person who wrote it, or the company who 
employs the person who wrote it at the time of writing. Usually, based 
on IP contracts of companies, no employed person can freely contribute 
to open source projects without a written consent by the employer 
without risking legal issues later. Some companies have quite nice IP 
contracts and then it works.
Copyright is also not easy to transfer, at least according to german law.

Existing copyright:
It is not allowed to change a license of existing code for other parties 
than the copyright holder.
For all NEPOMUK contributions, I have ensured that copyright is on the 
nepomuk consortium with shared copyright, so every nepomuk consortium 
member can freely relicense code.
Nevertheless, I have seen that for NEPOMUK contributions, we have used 
compatible licenses, and I have, as I am responsible for OSCAF from the 
DFKI side, all means to do whatever is needed with NEPOMUK ontologies 
(besides changing the copyrgith)

new code:
whatever we want.

best
Leo
> Cheers,
> Sebastian
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>
>   


-- 
____________________________________________________
Dr Leo Sauermann       http://www.dfki.de/~sauermann 

Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer 
Kuenstliche Intelligenz DFKI GmbH
Trippstadter Strasse 122
P.O. Box 2080           Fon:   +49 631 20575-116
D-67663 Kaiserslautern  Fax:   +49 631 20575-102
Germany                 Mail:  leo.sauermann at dfki.de

Geschaeftsfuehrung:
Prof.Dr.Dr.h.c.mult. Wolfgang Wahlster (Vorsitzender)
Dr. Walter Olthoff
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats:
Prof. Dr. h.c. Hans A. Aukes
Amtsgericht Kaiserslautern, HRB 2313
____________________________________________________

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