Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> writes: > Bjørn Mork <bj...@mork.no> writes: > >> IANAL, but I believe you are wrong there. You give them much wider >> rights than this by assigning the copyright to the FSF. The copyright >> owner is free to relicense the work in any way they want. > > Have you see the copyright assignment contract that you make with the FSF?
Seen and signed :-) > It would be a breach of that contract for them to relicense the work in > any way they want. The contract really does try to address this issue. > > The assignment isn't a unilateral act. The FSF promises to do things in > return for the assignment. Yes. It is pretty clear that the FSF as such cannot redistribute your work under another license. I most certainly may be wrong, and likely is, but I still believe there still is a tiny possiblity that the copyright assignment is transferred as an asset, without being bound by the other parts of the contract. > Now, bankruptcy is indeed a potential problem, since bankruptcy courts can > do all sorts of things, including dissolve or partly dissolve contracts. > But even in that admittedly dangerous situation, I do think there's a fair > amount of legal protection involved. (And one gets some additional legal > protection from the FSF being a non-profit under US law.) Good. Let's hope it won't be necessary. >> I still don't think issues like this should prevent anyone from >> contributing to any currently open source project. Yes, it will be >> frustrating if your work ends up being part of some proprietary >> software, but it's even worse if you cannot contribute to these projects >> out of fear of that happening. > > The main issue for some of us is not so much the ethical objections to > these sorts of agreements but rather the fact that our employers flatly > are not interested in signing anything of the sort, ever, with anyone. > Much of my free software work is done as part of my day job, and my > employer is unwilling to sign any of these agreements (but is fine with me > releasing my work under free software licenses). Yes, that is an important problem with such policies. Bjørn -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87boe87vqv....@nemi.mork.no