Ubuntu copyright assignment (was Re: Bradley Kuhn on switching back from Ubuntu to Debian)

[Elliot Murphy]

On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 9:29 AM, Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> I find it hard to see why contributions to the
> individual Ubuntu projects listed on that page are any different to
> contributions to other Ubuntu packages that aren't listed on the page.

The difference is that they are projects that Canonical employees have
written, Canonical has copyright on 100% of those programs and wants
to maintain that. Canonical would not try to take over copyright for
projects that already existed, and the current policy is that we ask
for copyright assignment for contributions to projects that we already
have 100% copyright on. I'm not arguing for or against copyright
assignment (it's a complex topic), just trying to explain why some
projects are listed here: http://www.canonical.com/contributors and
many, many others are not.
-- 
Elliot Murphy | https://launchpad.net/~statik/