Copyright

Many times the questions about copyright and ownership arise. Especially in the case of open source software it might become a problem to identify the real owner of a specific piece of work.

 I tried to figure out how the legal aspect in an open source project is laid out since this seems to make the situation of protecting intellectual property a fair amount harder. In one of my courses at university we have been working with OpenStack a cloud based computing program. It is an open source project with 1197 participants (at least 250 of them code contributors) from 92 companies and more participation announced all of the time.  Now, with some many people working on one and the same thing who owns the copyright and who gets a license?

According to an article I read the rights are distributed as follows: “OpenStack has the attributes that make open source developers happy: copyrights are kept by the contributors, the project is under the Apache Software License (ASL) 2.0, and the project is governed by a board with eight out of twelve elected seats.”

Apparently OpenStack is one of the projects that works just fine the way it is run despite the fear of corporate-led projects. One example would be Sun Microsystems's acquisition by Oracle and the ongoing problems that have ensued for some of the open source projects that Sun once led (OpenOffice.org, Hudson, MySQL, and Java).

An interview with Jonathan Bryce, founder of The Rackspace Cloud and member of the OpenStack Project Policy Board (PPB) also revealed some insight into the copyright policies and the success of OpenStack.

"We don't own the copyright," Bryce explained, "[contributors] decide who owns the code." With all contributions licensed under ASL 2.0, there's not a huge potential for Rackspace to hijack the OpenStack project.

So far no copyright issues have arisen in the OpenStack environment but as we could see on other projects the open source factor can bring nasty lawsuits and big trouble.