<quote who="QuantumG"> > I think this completely boils down to a BSD vs GPL question. The GPL and > other copyleft licenses (like the RPSL claims to be) serve a purpose that > the BSD does not and assigning your copyright to someone who then goes and > uses it in a proprietary product weakens that.
I understand why this perspective has currency, but I disagree with it quite strongly. The code is available under the GPL, the community has full GPL rights, and you have a single copyright owner who is prepared to defend the software and aggressively develop/improve the software because they have an important investment in it. The areas where copyright assignment has significant impact include: * the barrier to entry for casual contributors is raised * copyright assignment may exclude developers with stringent clauses related to copyright ownership in their employment contracts * if a company wanted to lose all credibility they ever had, they could abuse section 7 of the GPL to exclude everyone else from using the software under the GPL, thus "taking it away" entirely (rather than just working on the proprietary branch, as some companies have done, such as sistina - hooray for red hat for saving GFS) ... and remember, the company who owns the copyright *chose* to license it under the GPL. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth! - Jeff -- GUADEC 2005: Stuttgart, Germany http://2005.guadec.org/ "I think of [commercial Open Source development] as being the biggest private investment in public works in decades." - Andrew Tridgell -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
