Re: Which is better, assignment of rights, or licensing rights? (Tentacles of Evil Test)
* Cem F. Karan:
> 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.
I think what you call “assignments” is about contributions to
upstream. This does not directly affect what Debian ships (unless a
software license stipulates that any change is automatically licensed
(assigned?) to the original developer). It is a personal decision of
each Debian/upstream contributor. I assume that this is the reason
why it rarely comes up on debian-legal.
In practice, I see zero benefit from assignment. One of the largest
holders of assignments uses different licenses for programs and
documentation, so you cannot generate API documentation from doctext
strings, and they do not respond at all to relicensing requests when
there's an obvious mistake and the wrong license is used for a source
file. That's two cases where assignments should greately simplify
matters, but that's not what happens in my experience.
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