Re: Copyright assignment policy

["Luis Villa" <luis tieguy org>]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 8:24 AM,  <ash contact bg> wrote:
> Dear foundation members,
>
>  What is the policy of contributing to the GNOME project and expected copyright
>  assignment?
>
>  I am Alexander Shopov and I act as a co-ordinator of the Bulgarian Gnome
>  translation team.
>
>  Up till now, the copyrights have been assigned to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.
>
>  I have personally contacted the individual contributors who gave me their
>  permission (informal) to change the copyright assignments in the po-files for
>  those translators that had retained copyright and assign that to FSF.
>
>  I have acted so up till now in private conversations.
>
>  Is there an official policy of copyright assignment by contributors?

There is no official policy.

>  Who would hold principally the copyright?

Individual authors (or their employers, as appropriate.)

>  I have acted up till now from practical standpoint - a common copyright holder
>  would find it actually more easy to manage and re-license code.
>
>  Furthermore - will there ever be relicensing of the software?

Given the problem you highlight (vast amounts of code whose copyright
is held by a very distributed set of owners instead of a central
owner, including some sections which are GPL v2-only) this seems
unlikely; or, at least, unlikely without a concerted effort over the
course of years to seek out copyright holders and rewrite code.

[I would like to investigate whether or not GPL v3 is appropriate for
GNOME, but that seems mostly an academic/intellectual exercise.]

Luis