On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 02:02:49PM -0500, J.B. Nicholson-Owens wrote: > While I don't see anything with this addendum that prevents it from being > DFSG-free, I personally would avoid distributing the covered software > under this license addendum. I don't see anything here that is necessary > for Best Practical Solutions, LLC (hereafter BPS). Nor do I see anything > here that is a good idea for the community. If BPS wants to hold the > copyright for changes submitted for inclusion in future releases of the > program, they can negotiate that separately with each copyright holder. > I think BPS should license the program under the unmodified GPL and > separately arrange to get the copyright for patches BPS wants to include > in their fork of the program. [snip] I think you've raised several good points that need to be borne in mind when thinking about copyright assignment, or its near-cousin[1] in general. I don't get the impression that BPS is a malicious actor here. I think they are just trying to hedge their bets against the future. They want one version of their work that they distribute, and they want be able to conveniently change the license -- even to take it proprietary -- in the future. If people aren't comfortable with that, they shouldn't submit their work to BPS. If I worked at BPS, I would regard this policy as an interesting metric of how much my company is "trusted" by the community, to see how such submissions ebb and flow over time (of course, the first order factor is probably how widely the work in question is used, but there are presumably other ways of measuring that). Let's keep in mind that the FSF has a copyright assigment policy as well. It's very, very similar to BSP's, as I understand it, except that whereas the FSF is the assignee of the copyright and grants back to the original copyright holder a no-holds-barred license, BSP's submission policy has you granting them a no-holds-barred license, and retaining the copyright yourself. Both policies (BSP's and the FSF's) include an attestation on the purported copyright holder's part that he or she is the sole author of the work in question. Consquently, I think any analysis along these lines needs to take an informed look at the FSF's submission/assignment practices as well. [1] A worldwide, paid-up, nonexclusive, royalty-free, blah blah blah, license that gives someone almost as many rights as they'd have if the copyright were assigned to them. -- G. Branden Robinson | I had thought very carefully about Debian GNU/Linux | committing hara-kiri over this, but branden@debian.org | I overslept this morning. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Toshio Yamaguchi
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