Re: BSD license vs. Evolution assigment (was Re: Copyright assignment)

[Richard Stallman <rms gnu org>]

    For instance, promising to always distribute your contributions under
    the GPL, for pain of loosing the copyrights over contributions.

Part of the reason that the FSF has established itself as trustworthy
to assign copyrights to is that we have not asked contributors to
simply trust our good will.  FSF copyright assignments include a
commitment from the FSF to always distribute under a license that
permits redistribution under the same license, and to always make
source code available.  This is a contractual commitment.

Recently I figured out a way to strengthen this commitment so that it
comes closer to requiring a free software license (this was not an
easy task), and we're now working on a general copyright assignment
for other organizations to use.  When it's done, other organizations
will be able to use this to establish their bona fides as recipents of
copyright assignments.