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. Assigning copyright to the FSF has many advantages. First, it is much easier and more effective for the FSF to deal with license violations (claims from several copyright holders are weak in general), they have the resources, knowledge and everything necessary to do that. Besides, if someone sues you for using a patented algorithm or copyright infringement you'll have to deal with a lot of unpleasant papers, lawyers, courts, etc. Last, but not least, an evil doer will think a *lot* before commencing a lawsuit against FSF, while he may easily do it if the defendant is Karderio or Yavor Doganov. 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. 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. _______________________________________________ gnome-doc-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-doc-list
