[IAEP] Sugar Labs Individual Membership

[Bernie Innocenti]

Greg Dekoenigsberg wrote:
>> Healthy communities and volunteer-driven organizations are based on 
>> personal trust and not on prosecution of those who breach legal 
>> agreements.  Beware of those who tell you otherwise: they might be 
>> lawyers in disguise!
> 
> This is well and good, until someone steals a piece of Sugar code and 
> stuffs it into a proprietary application.  At that point, issues like "who 
> has standing to defend this codebase in a court of law" are no longer 
> niceties, but absolute necessities.

Unless I'm mistaken, such protection against code stealing would require a 
full copyright assignment, which few projects do other than the FSF.

The Linux kernel definitely doesn't, and in many cases has successfully 
"convinced" unwilling hardware vendors to go on and release source code 
for their products.

-- 
    \___/  Bernie Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
   _| X |  Sugar Labs Team  - http://www.sugarlabs.org/
   \|_O_|  "It's an education project, not a laptop project!"