On Sun, Dec 02, 2012 at 05:49:43PM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote: > The answer, as it happens, is the very terms of the FSF's copyright > assignment, which ensures the work remains available under a copyleft > license. *That* is the gold standard for copyright assignment, by which > other copyright assignments should be measured, not by whether the > counterparty is a for-profit or non-profit corporation. Right. But the discussions on whether the recipient of CAA/CLAs is good or evil (or those on the features of those agreements, FWIW) miss the main issue that we should have with them, I think. Back when I was collecting feedback about the Debian/FSF relationship for the GNU Hackers Meeting 2011, I received various comments from fellow Debian developers who refuse to maintain GNU software for which CAA/CLA were required. That's the crux of the issue for us: *mandatory* CAA/CLAs force Debian maintainers to either bow to them, or renounce pushing Debian changes back upstream --- something which is quite against our culture. Understandably, people might not like either option and will therefore simply refuse to maintain CAA/CLA encumbered software in Debian. The net result is a smaller public of potential Debian maintainers for a given software. That "damage" might be lower or higher depending on the perception of "evilness" of the recipient, or depending on the features that the relevant CAA/CLAs offer. But is not zero, unless the CAA/CLAs are optional, as it happens for KDE. IMO that is what we should worry about before adopting as a rather foundational part of the Debian OS something that requires mandatory CAA/CLA. Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . zack@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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