July 2008
Intermediate to advanced
384 pages
13h 6m
English
Content preview from Intellectual Property and Open SourceBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 11. Accepting Patches and Contributions
Imagine that you are a developer with a new open source project. You got permission from your employer (Chapter 9), you chose a license (Chapter 10), and you released version 0.01 on the Web. The next day, you received a bug report and a patch.
Great, but who owns the bug report? Who owns the patch? Can you use them?
Most people would answer that of course they can use the patch—after all, that is why the contributor sent it in. Unfortunately, that is not the whole story. Open source is a great mechanism for sharing code and sharing ideas, but it relies upon copyright to function smoothly. Therefore, proper copyright licensing has to be respected.
Back to (Copyright) Basics
Copyright is sometimes called the “metaphysics of the law” because it can get so theoretical about the interplay of ideas, expressions, and works. It should not be surprising, then, that the first item to be determined is whether a patch is a “work” that is eligible for copyright protection.
Rules for Works
Unfortunately, courts have not established a clear, easily applicable standard regarding whether or not something is a copyrightable work, especially in the software realm. Nevertheless, there are a number of good rules of thumb that can help you make this determination.
Patch length
The first thing to look at is the length of the patch. While there is no set length for determining whether something is a copyrightable work or not, many courts have found that very short ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.