Re: Another job for the Gnome Foundation ?

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Brian Behlendorf <brian@collab.net> writes:

> On 21 Aug 2000, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> > However, this makes the code effectively not GPL. One reason many
> > hackers like the GPL is because that way their contribution can never
> > be used in proprietary software. Copyright assignment to a for-profit
> > company dilutes this to some extent.
> 
> Who's talking about assignment to a for-profit?  I thought we were talking
> about assignment to the Foundation; and if the Foundation is a non-profit,
> then its assets can only be redistributed to another non-profit if it
> dissolves.  Are you talking about OpenOffice and Sun?  Sun's intent is
> that there comes to be an non-profit OpenOffice foundation, too, I think.
> 
> Clearly I'm out-opinioned on this, despite evidence that this has
> been a good thing for Apache; I'll shut up now I guess.
> 

No, I think assigning to a non-profit is great, though making it
mandatory might be problematic. Alan was raising the fact that some
for-profit companies apparently want or may want copyright assignment
to them (the corporation) for certain parts of GNOME. I don't know if
Alan had a specific example in mind.

 - Maciej