On Mon, Nov 20, 2017 at 3:33 AM, Samuel Thibault <[email protected]>
wrote:
> Brent W. Baccala, on dim. 19 nov. 2017 20:04:35 -0500, wrote:
> > The assignment of par. 1(a) above applies to all
> > past and future works of Developer that
> constitute
> > changes and
> > enhancements to the Program.
> >
> > An obvious reading of this is that everything I do on Hurd for the rest
> of my
> > life will belong to the Free Software Foundation.
>
> "the Program" meaning the FSF repository, not whatever branch you have
> on your disk or whatever.
>
The contract defines "the Program":
1.(a) Developer hereby agrees to assign and does hereby
assign to FSF Developer's copyright in changes and/or
enhancements to the suite of programs known as GNU HURD (herein called the
Program), including any accompanying
documentation files and supporting files as well as the actual program
code. These changes and/or enhancements are herein
called the Works.
There is no mention here of the FSF repository. "the Program" is GNU
HURD. Notice that if the GPL was read the way that you are proposing, as
soon as I made a change on my local disk, the GPL would no longer apply,
since the local copy would no longer be considered "the Program".
> > I've asked them to change the language and they have refused.
>
> Because they believe it already means what you want.
>
The way a legal contract is supposed to work is that the parties negotiate
until they develop language that everyone agrees on.
Of course, we know that often, legal contracts don't work that way at all.
Some big organization hands you a contract, tells to sign it, and if you
won't, too bad.
And everyone needs to get a lawyer, so it's all very, very expensive.
> > My patches are covered under the GPL; you're free to use them. Samuel
> can
> > incorporate them into the git repository, if he so chooses.
>
> I can not choose that alone. Being covered by assignments is a GNU
> decision.
>
True enough. I was needling you a bit. :-) Sorry if I caused any offense.
My point is that I've done everything that, say, Linus Torvalds would want
for code to be incorporated into the Linux kernel.
agape
brent
