Re: Another job for the Gnome Foundation ?

[Brian Behlendorf <brian collab net>]

On Mon, 21 Aug 2000 kelly@poverty.bloomington.in.us wrote:
> The entire point of the FSF's copyright assignment scheme is to
> facilitate defending the copyright against infringers.  Without
> assignment, bringing a suit to vindicate the license may (depending on
> how the courts look at the matter) require identifying all of the true
> owners of the code (which for a large project like GNOME could be
> nearly insurmountable) and having all of them join together in a suit.
> Failure to identify all of the owners might lead to a dismissal under
> FRCP Rule 19 for failure to join an essential party.  There are also
> nightmarish jurisdictional and conflict of laws issues since the
> owners of a project the size of GNOME are spread over numerous
> jurisdictions with disparate substantive and procedural law.

Strong arguments in favor of centralized ownership, thanks.

So I went and looked at the FSF's agreement; sure enough, it takes total
ownership, and then grants it back to the developer, so the original
developer can use it in non-GPLd software:

http://gcc.gnu.org/fsf-forms/assign.changes

   Upon thirty days' prior written notice, the Foundation agrees to
   grant me non-exclusive rights to use the Work (i.e. my changes and
   enhancements, not the program which I enhanced) as I see fit; (and the
   Foundation's rights shall otherwise continue unchanged).

> In effect, the mass common ownership of the intellectual property
> rights in any serious GPL'd project may very well make the copyright
> effectively unenforceable and reduces the status of GPL licensure to
> being little different than "released to the public domain".

(not cut, for emphasis)

	Brian