Re: [Gnu-arch-users] GNU copyright assignment

[John Meinel]

Zenaan Harkness wrote:
> > Speaking of which, how far along is the process of getting everybody with
> > copyright in arch to assign copyright to the FSF? Also, what's going to
> > happen to code that isn't handed over? 
>
>
> I assume that would be "whatever you decide" - how could it
> be anything else. It almost sounds like you're assuming that
> people will be "encouraging" you to do otherwise than you
> would choose of your own free will.

I think part of what he's mentioning is code that was contributed a 
while ago, by someone who we may not be able to contact. FSF requires 
everything to be signed over to them, so that they have the legal right 
to defend it in court. The official ruling is that code that is not 
signed over cannot be incorporated.

This may mean that code has to be pulled out of something like jblack's 
integration branch if he wants to get it into mainline. For me the big 
concern is who is going to audit everything, and as jblack asks, what do 
we do when chunks have to be pulled out?

Not to say that I don't agree with some of the rest of what you say. 
jblack does have a slight rebellious streak in him. But there is a 
general concern here. If code is GPL, it's not very difficult to assign 
copyright to FSF, they *could* decide to do bad things with it, but I 
think people generally trust them. (They could re-release code with a 
BSD license, for instance, since they own the copyright).

John
=:->

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