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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Jason" == Jason McCarty <address@hidden> writes:

    Jason> Thanks. I apologize for being rude, BTW; it's just some
    Jason> lingering annoyance from the time I tried to find it a
    Jason> couple years ago -- in order to rebut a slashdot post, at
    Jason> that!

According to RMS, the FSF deliberately refuses to distribute those
forms to the public so that you must get them from an FSF maintainer.
That is intended to prevent people from filling in an old version of
the form and sending it to the maintainer "to save time".

More important than the fact that the forms are hidden---you don't
have to sign them if you don't like them, and they are negotiable if
the FSF wants your code bad enough, after all---is the fact that
authors' names are may be hidden.  In the case of the FSF, as far as I
know anything like that is inadvertant---they keep and publish good
changelogs---but it's theoretically possible.  This means that if you
want access to some code under some terms and the FSF won't give it to
you, you are unable to ask the authors to give it to you under the
"grant-back" clause.

That probably doesn't bother anybody else here, but with respect to my
own contributions I dislike it.

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.