John Vandenberg wrote:
> I find it quite amusing that Sun (albeit on the openoffice.org site)
> ask contibutors to assign copyright to themself for much the same
> reasons as the FSF do.
>
> http://www.openoffice.org/copyright/assign_copyright.html
Well, IMO copyright assignment can be generally useful in open source /
free software projects, whether the assignment to a nonprofit
organization or a for-profit company. For my part, what I find amusing
is that a lot of people are unwilling to assign their copyrights to a
for-profit company, basically on the grounds that it's for-profit, and
then will turn around and willingly assign their copyrights to a
non-profit organization, basically on the grounds that it's a non-profit
and therefore "better" and more "trustworthy".
Presumably they're thinking that a for-profit company will be motivated
to take their software and do undesirable things like relicensing it
under a proprietary license, while a non-profit organization would
either never do such things or would be prevented from doing so by law.
But as I understand it, at least in the US, nothing inherently prevents
a nonprofit organization from disposing of its assets (including
copyrights) in whatever way its board decides, as long as the end result
is consistent with the basic purpose of the organization.
So, for example, if people assign copyrights in their open source / free
software code to the (mythical) nonprofit Foo Software Foundation,
nothing inherently prevents the board of that organization from
licensing that software under proprietary licenses instead of open
source / free software licenses, or even selling all the software
copyrights to MegaSoft Inc., and then using the proceeds from such
licensing or sale to sponsor scholarships for needy C++ programmers.
The reason I don't worry about this in the case of the (real) Free
Software Foundation is not because it's a nonprofit organization and not
even because Richard Stallman has strong beliefs in favor of free
software -- it's because the FSF assignment contracts (i.e., the forms
you use when you assign copyright to the FSF) contain reasonably strong
guarantees about the terms on which the FSF will license your
contributed software.
Nothing prevents a for-profit corporation from offering similar
legally-binding guarantees when people assign it copyrights to open
source / free software. It's probably too late now to introduce the idea
of copyright assignment into the Mozilla project, but in hindsight I
think it would have been possible to do Mozilla copyright assignment,
even assignment to Netscape (and now AOL Time Warner), in a way that
most people would likely have found acceptable.
Frank
--
Frank Hecker
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
