[Savannah-hackers-public] Re: Assigning a 'co-copyright' to the FSF?

[Karl Berry]

Hi folks,

First, Josh, thank you for your interest in GNU.

About the "co-copyright".  When something is dubbed an official GNU
package, it is entirely up to the author whether to assign the copyright
to the FSF.  If the author does choose to do that, the FSF grants back
all rights.  The result is that only the FSF holds the copyright
(otherwise any legal issues would become very complex), but the author
can do anything they want with their work.  This is discussed in the
maintainers' guide, http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain.

The FSF won't accept copyright on packages that are not official
GNU packages.  The way something gets officially dubbed is by going
through our evaluation process.  Our little form to start that going is
at http://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html.

If you do want to go down that road, one important question we'd like
your view on would be what sede offers that gnu.free doesn't, and
whether gnu.free should be improved instead of having a separate
package.  As you can imagine, from the standpoint of a coherent system,
we prefer not to have two programs doing the "same" thing.

Hope this helps clarify the issues.  Questions/comments welcome.

Best,
Karl