Re: Licensing and copyright

[Andy Tai <atai gnu org>]

I remember seeing the message "Copyright 1999-200x
Free Software Foundation, Inc. " in the about boxes of
several GNOME programs. 

Indeed the FSF is the most experienced party in
enforcing the GPL.  If an author wants to assign
copyrights, the FSF is the best candidate to receive
them.  


--- Rob Adams <readams readams net> wrote:
> I don't believe that any part of GNOME is currently
> an FSF copyrighted
> package.  However, would the FSF be interested in
> receiving copyrights
> in parts of GNOME by authors interested in making
> these assignments?  In
> practice, I don't think that this would happen very
> often.  If not,
> would if be worthwhile for the GNOME Foundation to
> fill this role?
> 
> On Sun, 2004-02-22 at 17:41 -0500, Richard Stallman
> wrote:
> 
> > Some GNU packages are FSF-copyrighted, and some
> are not.  For those
> > which are not, typically the authors keep the
> copyright, but they
> > could do something else instead.
> > 
> > For those packages which are FSF-copyrighted, we
> already have a sysem
> > in place for handling the copyright assignments. 
> It is described in
> > the file maintain.texi, which I believe can be
> found in
> > http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain.texi.  The
> maintainers look at each
> > contribution, decide what sort of papers are
> needed (if any, since tiny
> > changes don't require papers), and get papers
> signed *before* installing
> > the contribution.
> > 
> > If a part of GNOME is an FSF-copyrighted package,
> we would follow this
> > system.


=====
Andy Tai, atai atai org
Free Software: the software by the people, of the people and for the people! Develop! Share! Enhance! Enjoy!