Which webpage made you seethe? Was it this one?
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html To be fair the FSF is not a corporation. It is a non-profit charity. The FSF will not make any money on your code contribution. Also, for GNU code projects that have a tradition of requiring copyright assignment, all future contributions must have copyright assignment. * For instance, Emacs and GCC have this requirement. In GCC's case, this strict behavior, perhaps encouraged Steve Jobs to liberate Objective C. In the Hurd's case, I remember someone's code contribution making a Hurd debugger much more stable. Samuel *really* wanted to add that patch to the Hurd, but since the developer was not willing to assign copyright, Samuel could not add the code properly. If you are not willing to submit copyright assignment, then the most likely outcome, is that it will not be merged. :( May I explain why the FSF requires copyright assignment for some of its programming projects? I admit that the rest of this email will attempt to convince you to assign copyright. Sorry for the essay that will follow. In order to force GPL compliance, the FSF wants to own all copyright on its software projects. In this way, they can most effectively enforce the GPL, which means that no one uses the HURD in a proprietary software project. The video talk that encouraged me to assign any assignments to the FSF (to be fair, I'm not really a developer...so I have never submitted copyright assignments), was this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fox1CuoP2QD The basic idea behind that talk is this. You have three ways to try to make "Free or open source software". 1) non-copyleft licenses (MIT, BSD, etc. or public domain) 2) copyleft (GPL) + copyright assignments 3) copyleft (GPL) w/o copyright assignments. Each developer holds their individual copyright. 1) Almost always results in a proprietary version of the software. This means that some users are at the mercy of the developers, which is usually not good. 2) Is the tried and true route. No company is dumb enough to try to make Emacs or GCC proprietary. They would get sued, and they would quickly lose the lawsuit. User freedom is protected. Every two years or so, some University is upset because their "killer feature" for GCC will not be merged upstream until they assign copyright. The FSF has never folded on this. They will not accept code, unless you assign copyright. 3) This is a relatively new-ish (I think) idea. GNU Guix is trying this path. The problem here, is that the FSF may have a harder time to legally enforce GPL compliance. Since the FSF does not have the copyright, they may not have a legal case to make. It is up to each individual developer to enforce compliance, which may not be effective. We'll see... Sorry for the essay, Joshua * Also, I am not an expert, but the FSF may be willing to accept your code contribution if you place it in the public domain. But they rarely do so. They generally prefer you to assign them copyright. -- Joshua Branson Sent from Emacs and Gnus