[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Owning your own copyrights in Linux

[James Bottomley]

On Mon, 2016-08-29 at 12:16 -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Mon, 29 Aug 2016 08:54:22 -0700
> James Bottomley <James.Bottomley at HansenPartnership.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> > The rest of this is a bit offtopic (it would be on topic in the GPL
> 
> Sorry for hijacking your thread ;-)
> 
> > defence thread).  However, all I will say is that at the moment, if
> > you
> > don't own copyrights on your own contributions to Linux (and if you
> > took no actions to make this happen, you likely don't), you have no
> > legal standing in any GPL enforcement and a court would likely not
> > even
> > bother listening to your opinion.
> 
> Personally, I have a small amount of copyrights in the kernel that 
> were done while I was self employed. But a lot more belong to my 
> current employer. I have mixed feelings about trying to own those. 
> One, I trust my current employer with those copyrights, and two, they 
> paid me to do that code. It was never done "on my own time". I don't 
> feel right trying to claim copyright for code I was paid for, even if 
> it was all my idea to create.

Just on this point, one of the problems with companies is that they
sell stuff, go bust or get bought out.  Perhaps this will never apply
to Red Hat (although never say never) but many other people have to
bear in mind that the entity they trust to hold the kernel copyrights
today may not be the same entity tomorrow.

James