Re: Copyright assignment

[Christoffer Olsen <co deworks net>]

He does have a point, though. It's not an unrelated issue, because this
is why many developers will not even have, as Rui says, "a slight look
at mono". 

I do very well understand that the corporations wish to have other
possibilities with the software, and that they might regard it as a
bonus to have control over the software, or so to say; the opportunity
to use it in a closed source environment.

But if copyright assignment is what the corporations need, and they
really want to support free software and free software exclusively,
there's no problem for them to do the copyright assignment in a way that
would oblige them to re-release this code under, for instance, the GPL,
and the GPL exclusively. When a corporation fails to do so, you can
probably imagine pretty quickly that they have found out that letting
their free software be free in all terms, is not an option.

Many people may not care about this, as long as the software stays free
in _one_ way. Many want their software to stay free under all
circumstances, and that's why it's here. It can be treated as unfair
that we, the world, is able to use the free software under the terms of
a licence, while a corporation can use it exactly as they want. 

So I guess, it's up to the corporations to find out what they want. If
we imagine that half of their potential non-employed developer base
cares about this, then there's a lot of free code that's never to be
written.

Christoffer

On Wed, 2004-08-04 at 02:01 -0700, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Rui Miguel Seabra">
> 
> > Has the freedom to do it, not necessarily the power in that it needs a
> > better skill. Who's the employer of most (if not all) of the main coders,
> > who are extremely familiar with the source code?
> 
> Dude, this is entirely orthogonal issue to the question at hand. Please stay
> on-topic, and nice.
> 
> - Jeff
>