Re: Foundation and Source Code Copyright

["Luis Villa" <luis tieguy org>]

On 8/3/07, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org> wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-08-03 at 21:48 +0200, Juan José Sánchez Penas wrote:
> > On Fri, Aug 03, 2007 at 01:40:39PM -0400, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> > > ownership.  When multiple companies (Red Hat, Novell, Sun, ...) own
> > > copyright on a package, it's harder to do something wrong (for example,
> > > to relicense the package under a new license).
> >
> > Is this always something wrong? I guess sometimes making easier to change a
> > license can be good (in terms of freedom, for example). All depends on how
> > much you (want to) trust the copyright holder.
>
> Yeah, could be good if it was easier to say change Evo from GPLv2 to
> GPLv3+, but you either end up having many copyright holders anyway (all
> the people submitting non-trivial patches on bugzilla) or risk blocking
> development by bureaucracy of having to submit disclaimer or assignment
> forms first, like what Sun is doing with Java right now, or FSF with
> Emacs and some other projects.

But of course you have to weigh that risk (which is very real) with
the risk of someone finding a gigantic loophole in the existing
license and driving a truck through it. Not that any of *our*
contributors would do such a thing. Ahem. ;)

Luis