On 02/01/2009 06:37 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Andreas Roehler writes:
> IMO assignment policy contradicts the spirit of free software.
Please, Andreas, drop this thread. You are not going to change
anyone's mind.
Here's why:
> Copyright is an important issue now, taken very seriously.
Which is as it must be; the threat perceived by the free software
movement is from outside the community. Of course, the so-called open
source advocates perceive that threat as an opportunity.
Nevertheless, copyright remains important there, too.
But not all those whose distributions involves contributions by users force them to
assign their copyright. The "free software"
movement hasn't chosen that path, other than the FSF afaik. Certainly Xemacs,
TeX, LaTeX haven't.
Stephen Turnbull wrote:
It is helpful. The GNU Project's mission is to preserve a body of
code sufficient to support a free operating system, and it is the
FSF's job to provide legal support for that. The assignment allows
the FSF to defend code you contribute on your behalf, at no cost to
you. It would be far more costly to defend the code if it were not
assigned.
That's not so, Stephen. Again, look at some of the other applications that are
in a similar position. You should read
the LaTeX license. An early section of it states:
"The document `modguide.tex' in the base LaTeX distribution explains
the motivation behind the conditions of this license. It explains,
for example, why distributing LaTeX under the GNU General Public
License (GPL) was considered inappropriate."
I think that their structure is well conceived and protects both the integrity
and functionality of the LaTeX source
and packages submitted by users without any need to assign copyrights. Their
situation and that of GNU Emacs seems
very similar to me (note caveat).
Bev
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