Re: Savannah vs. Gitlab

[Maxthon Chan]

If the Czech law forbid transferring of copyright should we deny all Czech 
entities from contributing, as whatever document signifying the transfer of 
rights will not stand in a Czech court? Chinese law listed a few rights 
permanently untransferable and does that affect me, being a citizen of China, 
in contributing work back?

The legal umbrella can also work if the contributor signed a delegation 
document allowing the project leader, or FSF, to sue GPL violator in his name. 
So if this delegation of right of lawsuit work, by the principal of least 
privileges, why transfer copyright in the first place? And this delegation does 
not need to be signed as a precondition of contribution in the first place, and 
can be even issued starting from a case-by-case basis.

Even scarier, what if someone controlling FSF after RMS suddenly decided to 
relicense all code they own to something proprietary and ask all contributors 
to surrender their FSF-owned code, sending out DMCA notices in the process 
which will legally stand given the license transfers before? Although this is 
movie plot straight out of Tron series but given the similarity of Flynn and 
RMS+Woz and the greediness of the rest of the world in general this is not that 
far fetched, and it have happened at least once already (when Oracle bought Sun 
and reversed a few of Sun’s GPL licensing decisions, the very licensing scare 
that created MariaDB and LibreOffice projects)

Dangerous territory ahead, folks.

> On Dec 8, 2015, at 04:50, Matt Rice <ratmice@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 12:17 PM, Svetlana A. Tkachenko
> <svetlana@members.fsf.org> wrote:
>> http://translationproject.org/html/whydisclaim.html
>> https://crm.fsf.org/civicrm/profile/create?gid=91&reset=1
>> 
>> --
>> Svetlana A. Tkachenko
>> Member of the Free Software Foundation
>> www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org www.freenode.net
>> 
>> "Svetlana A. Tkachenko" <svetlana@members.fsf.org> wrote:
>>>> just the need to do a snail mail round-trip with FSF to be allowed to
>>>> contribute is a great obstacle for any FSF project.
>>> 
>>> I do not know about gnu projects, but for translationproject I was made
>>> to do the sign off using an online form. This is much easier.
> 
> The FSF does accept copyright assignments online but only from a few 
> countries,
> Germany, USA, and most recently Italy, see the GNU maintainers guide
> for details,
> the mechanism by which this is done differs by country, some accept
> GPG while others require emailing a scanned copy of the signed
> paperwork
> 
> https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/fsf-to-begin-accepting-gpg-signatures-for-copyright-assignments-from-italy
> 
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