On Mon, 2004-02-23 at 11:07 +0800, James Henstridge wrote: > On 22/02/2004 8:34 PM, Jean-Michel POURE wrote: > > >Worst case scenario 2: > > > >"After receiving a copyright assessment, the FSF becomes the sole owner of > >the original work. If one day the FSF is forced to pay a large sum of money, > >for example in case of patent infringement, the judge may decide to use any > >means to revover the money, including rewriting the licenses and later > >selling them." > > > >Trust is not the issue, I only prefer to live by my own country rules. We can > >only fight and defend Free Software at an international level. > > > > > Before guessing about the worst case senario of what might happen to > code you donate to the FSF, maybe it would be a good idea to review the > standard assignment agreement they use. I can't find an up to date > version, but here is a copy I found on a mailing list: > http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2002-09/msg00678.html > > The FSF agreement is not one sided like some agreements. In exchange > for assigning your copyright, they promise to (a) release it under a > copyleft (see the actual form for exact wording), and (b) grant > non-exclusive rights to you to do whatever you want with your work (ie. > you can do pretty much whatever you want with your code after assignment). > > If the FSF went evil and took all the code people had assigned and made > it proprietary, they would be breaking their promises in the assignment > contract. If the contract was voided then the ownership of the code > would revert to the original owner, which would mean they had no right > to change the license on the code. > > This means that you _don't have_ to trust the FSF completely when > assigning code. When you think about it, this would also make it > impossible for them to relicense all of their code under an "evil GPL > version N+1". A lot like a one-sided Chinese finger trap, if that makes any sense at all.
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