On Fri, 2011-05-27 at 16:33 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote: > Copyright assignments to one organization put that organization in a > strong position to enforce the GPL in court, because it can claim > copyright over the whole work. The FSF's lawyers advised us to get > copyright assignments for contributions to our packages saying it > would reduce uncertainty in enforcing the GPL. > > GNOME does not have to do this, but it might be a good idea for the > GNOME Foundation to ask for copyright assignments for certain > components. Maybe there has been little GPL violation for GNOME, but > that might change if mobile devices start using it. IMHO, BusyBox is a good counter-example. They do not require copyright assignment, they have multiple copyright holders and they have successfully defended GPL on lawsuits. BusyBox is used in embedded systems. > The FSF copyright assignments put binding requirements of good conduct > on the FSF. For instance, we must provide source code and allow > redistribution. We designed these requirements to give contributorsd > a basis to trust us in addition to knowing we act on principle. > The GNOME Foundation could do likewise. > > When companies ask for copyright assignments, they may be seeking > to use your code in proprietary software. Here's an article > that suggests what to look for when thinking about that question. > http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/assigning-copyright. There are some disadvantages of having one copyright holder, for instance, a single copyright holder is a single point of failure, as is described in https://live.gnome.org/CopyrightAssignment/Guidelines -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/
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