On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 08:56:47PM -0500, Alan Shutko wrote: > Bijan Soleymani <bijan@psq.com> writes: > > > This makes a lot of sense. I mean if the FSF hired you to write a > > GPL program, they wouldn't want you to release a proprietary version of > > it after you quit working for them. > > Believe it or not, I don't think they'd care. I haven't been hired > by the FSF, but I've signed the standard copyright assignment they > require to put your changes in their tree, and it explicitly grants > back rights for me to do whatever I want with it, including use it > commercially. (Of course, this only counts for stuff I wrote, not the > rest of the app.) > > I believe that L. Peter Deutsch was allowed to use the Display > Ghostscript code he wrote in the non-GPLed version of GS (though, I'm > not sure). That was at least partly funded by the FSF. From what I've read on the FSF website their position is that they won't accept any submissions unless they are: a) public domain b) copyright released to the FSF I don't know the specifics I haven't given them code, that's what they say in their docs. Now maybe they keep the copyright and give the programmer a license to do whatever they want, *but* they definately keep the copyright, *if* what they're saying is true at all. The reason being that if they don't own all the code on their software they believe it can undermine any possible court case. That is a big reason why GNU emacs won't accept some code from Xemacs because they won't sign over the copyright. If the FSF really allowed such liberal usage I doubt it would either serve the FSF's stated purpose to help them out in court, or whether so many people would hesitate to hand them their code. Again, I haven't dealt with the FSF so I can't say for sure, but at least in certain cases, emacs and gcc, they say that they won't accept code that they don't have the copyright on. They say that they accept public domain contributions if they are large but that they prefer having copyright attributed to the FSF so that they can defend in court. Bijan
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