Copyright Assignment – Fiduciary License Agreement
Since this is not a commercial enterprise, and we prefer to believe in
everyone’s good faith, previously developers could assign the copyright
by explicitly acknowledging that they do so in their first submission.
This was sufficient if the developer is independent, or an employee of a
not-for-profit organization or a university. However, in an effort to
ensure that the Bacula code is really clean, beginning in August 2006,
all previous and future developers with SVN write access will be asked
to submit a copyright assignment (or Fiduciary License Agreement – FLA), which means you
agree to the LICENSE in the main source directory. It also means
that you receive back the right to use the code that you have submitted.
Any developer who wants to contribute and is employed by a company should either list the employer as the owner of the code, or get explicit permission from him to sign the copyright assignment. This is because in many countries, all work that an employee does whether on company time or in the employee’s free time is considered to be Intellectual Property of the company. Obtaining official approval or an FLA from the company will avoid misunderstandings between the employee, the company, and the Bacula project. A good number of companies have already followed this procedure.
The Fiduciary License Agreement is posted on the Bacula web site at: www.bacula.org/en/FLA-bacula.en.pdf
The instructions for filling out this agreement are also at: www.bacula.org/?page=fsfe
It should be filled out, then sent to:
Kern Sibbald
Cotes-de-Montmoiret 9
1012 Lausanne
Switzerland
Please note that the above address is different from the officially registered office mentioned in the document. When you send in such a complete document, please notify me: <kern at sibbald dot com>, and please add your email address to the FLA so that I can contact you to confirm reception of the signed FLA.
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