On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 10:12:17AM +0100, Greg Stark wrote:
> On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 1:03 PM, Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> > The COPYRIGHT file shows that VMware is claiming copyright on unstated
> > parts of the code for this. As such, its not a normal submission to
> > the PostgreSQL project, which involves placing copyright with the
> > PGDG.
>
>
> Fwiw I was under the same misconception when I started at Google. But
> this is wrong.
>
> We have no copyright assignments to any entity named PGDG. All the
> code is copyright the original authors. The PGDG is just a collective
> noun for all the the people and organizations who have contributed to
> Postgres. As long as all those people or organizations release the
> code under the Postgres license then Postgres is ok with it. They
> retain ownership of the copyright for the code they wrote but we don't
> generally note it at that level of detail and just say everything is
> owned by the PGDG.
>
> I'm not a lawyer and I make no judgement on how solid a practice this
> is but that's VMware doesn't seem to be doing anything special here.
> They can retain copyright ownership of their contributions as long as
> they're happy releasing it under the Postgres copyright. Ideally they
> wold also be happy with a copyright notice that includes all of the
> PGDG just to reduce the maintenance headache.
Yes, completely true, and I was not clear on that myself either.
Several people pointed out similar user copyrights in our existing code,
which I then realized were not a problem. As long as the copyright
details are the same as our code, anyone can hold the copyright, I
think.
Part of my concern was patents. Because VMWare asserts patents on
Postgres enhancements, when I saw VMWare copyright code, my "concern"
antenna went up and was glad to find it had all be handled by Heikki
already.
-- Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +