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SUN SWATs
REDUX |
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| This week,
LinuxWorld.com told us they had a genuine problem. A contributor
submitted a story to them about Sun. They ran it. The LinuxWorld editor in
chief tells us that the contributor signed an author's agreement that
transferred ownership of the copyright for the story to LinuxWorld. As such,
says the LinuxWorld chief, the story is LinuxWorld's property.
There's nothing unusual about any of that except for the fact that their contributor had earlier submitted his Sun story to us. Open, which has since moved to a Creative Commons copyright license, allowed the author to retain the copyright. In this we made a critical error. Later the author made a deal for a derivative work with LinuxWorld.com before we posted our story. As part of the agreement, he transferred copyright ownership, which was entirely within his rights under his agreement with Open. Worse yet, Linuxworld.com posted their version of the story one day before we posted on Open. Can you spell M*E*S*S? Word to future contributor hopefuls. For Open to confidently license all of its stories under a Creative Commons license, we really need to hold the copyright to the story version as it appears in Open. So in the future, you'll be asked to relinquish the copyright to the work as it appears in Open. As for a good
read about Sun's future prospects, with different edits, you can find
"How Sun Can Pull Out of Its Slump"
at
http://www.linuxworld.com/2003/0129.sun.html |