Tuesday, September 6, 2016

About Tunisia

I start to get excited about my travel to Tunesia next week.

It is now quite exactly one one year that Hamza discovered Lino and started working for us as a freelancer, and this is our first real life meeting. This is also the first time that I leave the European continent (yes, I am not a good tourist).

I read about Chott el Djerid and Desert roses, and then A savoir avant de partir en vacances en Tunisie.

About copyright

I read Copyright in General and What Does Copyright Protect?, then the Wikipedia articles about Copyright and Opposition to copyright.

“When an author dies, the ownership of the copyright changes. Copyright is personal property, so the person who created the work could choose whom to pass the ownership of the copyright to. Copyright is treated no differently than other property. So ownership in a copyright can be passed to an heir or to a third party via a will.” (source).

I realized that actually I am not the copyright owner of Lino. If I would die suddenly, Rumma & Ko as my employer would be the copyright owner. At least according to US laws. To check whether Estonian laws say the same. I should either write an annex to my work contract, or change all copyright headers and make Rumma & Ko the copyright holder of all my work.

And then I should check with Hamza whether he agrees to assign copyright on his contributions to Rumma & Ko. Since he is a freelancer and not an employee, “he will usually retain copyright in any works he produces, unless there is a contractual agreement to the contrary.” (found here). If we don’t write an agreement about it, Lino is a collective work.

Another option would be to assign copyright to the FSF. Or rather to the FSFE because they are in Europe. They have the Fiduciary License Agreement for that.

I read Is it fair to require copyright assignments from contributors of an OS project? and rather agree with the answerers.

But “unfortunately, FSFE is no longer accepting new projects under the Fiduciary Programme at the moment” (see here). And I also saw FSFE’s Fiduciary License Agreement is no panacea.

Don’t all these questions become near to irrelevant if we simply change the license for all Lino projects from AGPL to BSD?

Content management à la Lino

I tried to get lino_book.projects.cms up and running again. This demo was completely broken. Now it is a bit less broken, but needs a bit more work before it is worth a look.