 Hi there, and welcome to my Academy Talk. The talk with the subtitle, eventually, you'll all be dead. I'm Adrian, and I'm going to be talking about Katie E's fiduciary license agreement. That means licensing, copyright, legal bits. Copyright is one of those things that just happens. There's a plenty of laws around it, but most of the time, whenever you do something creative, copyright happens. So if you do something creative, two kinds of copyright are created. Moral rights, which identify you as the author or the creator of the work, and economic rights, rights to the exploitation of the work. So if I grab my ugly red guitar over here, and play a little song, you know, like, I like to work on Katie E. It's written in plus plus C. Bam! Copyright happens. I now have the moral rights to be identified as the author of that terrible little song, and if we want to exploit it, that's my right as well. Speaking of copyright, the license on this talk is Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike 4.0. As long as the copyright exists, that's the license you'll need to abide by when you reuse or remix this particular talk. So for the next 70 years or so, those economic rights attached to this talk are dealt with. That's a long time. Because copyright lasts a long time, and it's longer than I personally am likely to care about the economic rights to this particular talk. As a matter of fact, it's probably longer than I myself will last. That's a long time. But during that time, I can trade in those economic rights. The economic rights to a talk, or to any creative work, can be bought, sold, traded on the market. You're going to sign them through contracts. You can even give them away. When you license something, you're not giving away the economic rights. You're granting a license. You're granting use. And so open source licensing retains the original economic rights. The author of the creative work, the author of the source code, still has those economic rights. And of course, the moral rights as well. Those never go away. But those economic rights still vest in the original author. There's a number of reasons you might want to contact a rights holder, the holder of the economic rights to a particular creative work. For instance, if licensing needs to change, licensing might need to change because it's unclear, because it's incompatible. For instance, if you've got source code that combines two different open source licenses, it may be incompatible. And you may want to contact the original rights holder to find out what was actually intended. You may want to ask the original rights holder to grant a different license so that it becomes compatible. This is also one of the reasons that licenses get updated. When laws change, when interpretations change, when technologies change, licenses may need to change with them. And at that point, you need to contact the rights holder to ask them for a new license, a new grant to use the copyrighted work. Another reason to talk to original rights holders is in case of infringement. In general, it is only the original rights holder who can deal with infringement violations of the license. Someone is making illegal copies. Well, it's the original rights holder who has standing to deal with it. Basically that means has standing to sue. As long as we're trading in the economic rights to a creative work, there's a number of ways that the rights holder can be changed. Generally, if you're working for hire, your creative work is copyrighted by your employer, not by yourself. This isn't all that common in the open source world, but in general work for hire situations, it is. You can assign or trade the economic rights to somebody else through some kind of an agreement, a sales agreement, for instance. And you can also assign the economic rights through some other legal instrument. And I'm going to return to the subtitle of this particular talk and remind you someday all of us will be dead. And your will is a legal instrument that transfers economic rights to somebody else, namely your next of kin. So there's a number of reasons why you might want to change the rights holder, and whichever reason applies to you, you can use any one of those instruments that I mentioned earlier to change the right holder. You can sell, trade, or give away. One of the instruments that exists is called a fiduciary license agreement. The word fiduciary comes from Fidesz, Latin for trustworthy, someone you trust to do the right thing. And a fiduciary license agreement is generally something of the form, I trust you to do the right thing and you trust me right back, because your fiduciary is someone you trust with your life or at least your creative output. So KDEV has a fiduciary license agreement, and you might want to change the rights holder in your creative work to KDEV. One reason to do that is because KDEV has a charter and a social contract, it's bound by its own statutes. And so it can't change its mind all that easily. You know now that it's going to abide by certain principles, and it's going to continue to do so independently of the individual members of the EV, and independently of short or long term gain. The EV exists as long as as it as an association exists, and the United Nations is actually the successor organization for KDEV. So you can rest assured that as long as the United Nations exists, someone can take care of the responsibilities of KDEV as copyright holder. And so the the FLA, the fiduciary license agreement that tries to assign copyright to KDEV was written in conjunction with the Free Software Foundation Europe. And basically it takes all the assignable bits, all the economic rights, gives them to the KDEV, and right away gives everything right back to you. Here's the URL to read the actual document. Here's a quote from the document, which basically says what I just said. Here, we'll give you this stuff. And we give you a non exclusive license right back at you. The effect of this is that KDEV has standing to deal with all those reasons to contact the rights holder. The EV has standing to sue has standing to re license. In real licensing, it's bound by an additional document, the fiduciary re licensing policy, which says what kind of real licensing KDEV can do. But as a consequence also, because you got everything back, you can re license and distribute your source code, your which is your source code, as usual. So all in all, if you're a contributor KDE, any part of KDE under the entire umbrella, and you trust the KDEV, and you've read the document and find it to be in order, you could sign the FLA. The FLA is entirely optional. It's entirely optional to sign the FLA. But if you do, you make KDEV stronger. And it can take some responsibilities off of your shoulders, the responsibilities for those economic rights and place them on somebody else's. This has been my talk. Remember, someday, all of us will be dead.