[Celinux-dev] Reverse Engineering and the new CELF Wiki

[Tim Bird]

Paul Mundt wrote:
> Scott Preece wrote:
>> For these two questions, that should probably include saying that the
>> editors reserve the right to remove material that is offensive, illegal,
>> or infringes copyrighted material,  that the site is bound by CELF's IP
>> rules and not subject to control by any individual company, and that
>> while material is licensed to the site by the author (under the GPL and
>> GFDL, if that's where we ended up), the author retains ownership and the
>> ability to use or license it elsewhere.
>>
> I agree with most of this, though it should be clear that the CELF IP
> rules apply to the members, not the contributors. We do not want to drive
> this as another version of the CELF public wiki. The basic boilerplate
> restrictions on infringing material seem good enough to me, we don't want
> to get in to IP ownership assertions and transference of liability.

I agree with everything Paul wrote.  While CELF is a sponsor of the
site, it is not a CELF site.  The IP rules in CELF's membership
agreement do not apply.  However, CELF's IP rules are common sense,
and nothing in them applies to the situations you are describing anyway.
CELF's rules are about explicitly requiring submissions to be licensed
under open source, and about patent notifications.

As a side note on the topic of requiring patent notifications, it
might be useful to explain why I think they are not essential for
the embedded linux wiki.

Their purpose in the CELF bylaws is to guard against "submarine patents",
which are real threat to the goals of many standards organizations.
However, the situation with Linux is a bit different.  Many people
believe (as do I), that the use of submarine patents is much more
problematic with code published under an open source license (particularly
the GPL). It could easily be interpreted by a judge that knowingly
distributing code under a GPL license implicitly grants a patent
license to the material in question.  If it doesn't, it creates an
obvious contradiction in licensing terms.  The GPL has a "shutdown"
clause which precludes distribution in this case, which effectively
also shuts down the possibility of collecting patent royalties. So
the net effect is that a submarine patent in GPL code is self-defeating.

Anyway, as Scott has pointed out, CELF does not acquire any copyright
or ownership rights in the wiki content.  They are retained by the author.
As Paul said, if someone is paranoid, they can mirror the content
and publish it elsewhere if CELF ever removes its sponsorship.
Since mirroring the content wouldn't be a bad idea for backing up
the material anyway, I'll even help them write the script! :-)
 -- Tim

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Tim Bird
Architecture Group Chair, CE Linux Forum
Senior Staff Engineer, Sony Electronics
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