Re: GPT partlabel support for Mach
Which webpage made you seethe? Was it this one?
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html
To be fair the FSF is not a corporation. It is a non-profit charity.
The FSF will not make any money on your code contribution.
Also, for GNU code projects that have a tradition of requiring copyright
assignment, all future contributions must have copyright assignment. *
For instance, Emacs and GCC have this requirement. In GCC's case, this
strict behavior, perhaps encouraged Steve Jobs to liberate Objective C.
In the Hurd's case, I remember someone's code contribution making a Hurd
debugger much more stable. Samuel *really* wanted to add that patch to
the Hurd, but since the developer was not willing to assign copyright,
Samuel could not add the code properly. If you are not willing to
submit copyright assignment, then the most likely outcome, is that it
will not be merged. :(
May I explain why the FSF requires copyright assignment for some of its
programming projects? I admit that the rest of this email will attempt
to convince you to assign copyright. Sorry for the essay that will follow.
In order to force GPL compliance, the FSF wants to own all copyright on
its software projects. In this way, they can most effectively enforce the
GPL, which means that no one uses the HURD in a proprietary software
project.
The video talk that encouraged me to assign any assignments to the FSF
(to be fair, I'm not really a developer...so I have never submitted
copyright assignments), was this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fox1CuoP2QD
The basic idea behind that talk is this. You have three ways to
try to make "Free or open source software".
1) non-copyleft licenses (MIT, BSD, etc. or public domain)
2) copyleft (GPL) + copyright assignments
3) copyleft (GPL) w/o copyright assignments. Each developer holds their
individual copyright.
1) Almost always results in a proprietary version of the software. This
means that some users are at the mercy of the developers, which is
usually not good.
2) Is the tried and true route. No company is dumb enough to try to
make Emacs or GCC proprietary. They would get sued, and they would
quickly lose the lawsuit. User freedom is protected. Every two years
or so, some University is upset because their "killer feature" for GCC
will not be merged upstream until they assign copyright. The FSF has
never folded on this. They will not accept code, unless you assign
copyright.
3) This is a relatively new-ish (I think) idea. GNU Guix is trying
this path. The problem here, is that the FSF may have a harder time to
legally enforce GPL compliance. Since the FSF does not have the
copyright, they may not have a legal case to make. It is up to each
individual developer to enforce compliance, which may not be effective.
We'll see...
Sorry for the essay,
Joshua
* Also, I am not an expert, but the FSF may be willing to accept your
code contribution if you place it in the public domain. But they rarely
do so. They generally prefer you to assign them copyright.
--
Joshua Branson
Sent from Emacs and Gnus
Reply to: