Which is better, assignment of rights, or licensing rights? (Tentacles of Evil Test)
I was reviewing the tests that Paul Tagliamonte pointed me to in the "RE: What are the tests? was: RE: [Non-DoD Source] Re: MongoDB Server Side Public License, Version 1 (SSPL v1)" thread, and it got me to thinking about the IP rights, and the Tentacles of Evil Test. All of the Free licenses I know of are exactly that; licenses of rights. However, I know that some companies really want assignments of rights. I can see arguments going both ways. The upside of assigning rights means that if there are conflicting licenses, then lawyers can normalize the entire package to a single license. It is also possible to change the license if a hole is found in one. The downside is that Evil Corp. can arbitrarily change the terms of the license for the complete package, rather than just the portions that they own, potentially preventing contributors from continuing work on material that they developed and contributed.
In my personal view, I think that Debian should lean towards licenses, and discourage assignments where possible; that ensures that if someone is a bad actor, then there will still be a chance to fork the code and continue open development as all the good actors will still have the necessary ownership over the parts that they contributed.
Thoughts?
Thanks,
Cem Karan
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