On Thursday 08 February 2007, E. Wing wrote: > Yeah, good point I forgot about this. But I've always been told (not > by lawyers) that assigning the copyright to the FSF is not so much for > relicensing issues like we're talking about, but for defending > copyrights in court. My understanding is that if SCO were to violate > my copyright on some code I wrote, by default, only I could sue SCO > for copyright infringement. Nobody else (IBM, FSF) could sue because > they have no claim to damages. If I assign my copyright to FSF, then > they have a claim and can sue. I'm not sure what FSF can do about > relicensing in this case. Seems like they could on the surface, but > that sounds ugly too. Imagine if they went anti-free software and > relicensed everything under some evil license.
Yes, this is the main reason why they are asking for the copyright to be assigned to them. However, if ever FSF decides to change the license to e.g. GPL v.3 they can do it as well, since they are the sole copyright owner. Of course, it is possible that when you assign the copyright to them they could let you retain some rights with regards to this, but that I do not have a clue about - I have never dealt with them. Jan -- Jan Ciger GPG public key: http://www.keyserver.net/
pgp7j04Nf8ZBM.pgp
Description: PGP signature
_______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://openscenegraph.net/mailman/listinfo/osg-users http://www.openscenegraph.org/
