Re: Future licence suggestions (was : License problem in Ubuntu Desktop Guide)

[karderio <karderio gmail com>]

Re :o)

On Sat, 2006-09-09 at 14:12 +0300, Yavor Doganov wrote:
> karderio wrote:
> > 
> > Would it not be a good idea to assign copyright to the FSF or GNOME
> > foundation anyhow ? Surely some point in the future will require a
> > licence change, which would seem impossible without this...
> 
> That's a good thing.  Only the copyright holder can change the license
> so if it is FSF, you have the assurance that it won't be changed to a
> non-copyleft license that doesn't protect users' freedom.  With the
> licenses published by FSF requiring permission for upgrading is not
> necessary -- e.g. if the license is GPLv2 or later and GPLv3 goes out,
> you may publish your next release under "GPLv3 or later" w/o asking
> the FSF.

Just to make this clear, you are saying that if you assign copyright to
the FSF, you can change your licence from GPLv2 to GPLv3 (for example)
without needing any permission from the FSF. If the copyright is held by
several sparse individuals, you still need the permission of everyone to
upgrade your licence.

> Since the current copyright system is unfair and wrong, the idea is
> FSF to act as a stock copyright holder and "owner" (in quotes, because
> the idea of ownership is wrong) for most of the GNU system.  Since
> many developers are selfish and do not fully understand the goals of
> the Free Software Movement, there's a lot of free software that has
> thousands of copyright holders.  This may be even harmful -- consider
> a project that is licensed "GPLv2 only" and the present developers
> cannot find all past contributors in order to change the license.
> Such program will be isolated in, let's say, 5 or 10 years.

I think many projects are in this situation, this seems rather dangerous
and could render much software unusable in the case of new copyright
laws for example. I'm wondering if GPLv3 could address this issue at
all...

> Basically, what we want, at least what I want, is give away our work
> to the society with the guarantee that it will always remain free, and
> without having to worry about the legal consequences that at some
> moment may ruin our lives (for example, if the proprietary empire
> begins massive evil actions against our community).  This is best
> achieved when licensing our work under GPL/LGPL/FDL and assigning
> copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

Stars to Yavor for libre software advocacy ! Sorry if this thread is
slightly off topic.

Love, Karderio.