Re: Gentoo Linux copyright / CDDL question

[David Kastrup]

"Alfred M. Szmidt" <ams@gnu.org> writes:

>    (4) In other places they claim they're doing this because GNU,
>    Debian, and the BSDs are requiring copyright transfer as well
>    [1]. Well I know that some GNU projects recommend it (emacs,
>    libstdc++), but by far not all; and I have heard first hand that
>    Debian not only does not require it, but they don't even have an
>    entity one could assign copyright to even if one wanted to. (Does
>    anyone know about the BSDs?)
>
> None of the BSDs require copyright assignments.
>
> Requiring copyright assignments is a good practise though.

It depends on how important it is to you to enforce the license.
People using a BSD style license usually do so mainly because they
don't bother too much about what a recipient might do.

Basically, the question is "would you sue for compliance?".  If the
answer is "no, never, and I won't ever transfer my copyrights to
anybody else that would", then there is no point in asking for
copyright assignments.  And actually in this case the point of picking
GPL over BSD license would also be just sending a message rather than
making a legal difference.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum