Re: Another job for the Gnome Foundation ?

[rms39 columbia edu (Russell Steinthal)]

On Mon, 21 Aug 2000 17:28:56 PDT, Brian Behlendorf wrote:

>Finally, with this code being GPL, I don't understand the concern 
that
>any entity, be it the Gnome foundation, or openoffice.org, or 
whoever gets
>copyright, being able to "run away" with the code; they can change 
the
>license, but they aren't able to keep anyone from using, enhancing, 
and
>redistributing older versions under the GPL.

The problem is future, rather than older versions, at least as I see
it.  If I write code and release it under the GPL, I am doing so with
the understanding that the license requires all derivative works based
on that code to be GPL'ed. If I assign the copyright to someone else,
however, that expectation ceases to be: the assignee could release a
proprietary version of the software which I wrote.  Sure, that
wouldn't prevent others from using the earlier versions under the
terms of the GPL, but the ability to prevent future proprietary/closed
source uses of code is one of the primary reasons developers choose
the GPL over, for example, the BSD license.

Since I think that developers should be able to control the future
uses of their code, I would oppose a mandatory assignment regime.
There's nothing wrong with the GNOME Foundation being able to accept
assignments from willing authors, however, and a module maintainer
should still be able to require patches to conform to a particular
assignment regime before they are integrated.

-Russell
-- 
Russell Steinthal		Columbia Law School, Class of 2002
<rms39@columbia.edu>		Columbia College, Class of 1999
<steintr@nj.org>		UNIX System Administrator, nj.org