On Apr 26, 2010, at 8:11 AM, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote: > It's unclear whether the LLVM-style implicit copyright assignment > is really enforceable, and this certainly isn't a forum to debate > it. In any case, it doesn't really matter, because the only reason > copyright needs to be assigned (AFAIK) is to change the license. > > This is not the only reason (and in the GNU projects case, not a > reason at all), the main reason is to be able to enforce the copyright > of the work without having to call in everyone into court. If only > parts of GCC where copyrighted by the FSF, then the FSF could only sue > only for those parts.
Someone else pointed this out elsewhere in the thread, so perhaps it is worth responding. Being able to enforce copyright is specifically useful if your code is under a GPL-style license. For code under a bsd-style "do whatever you want, but don't sue us" style license, this is much less important. That is why I claimed that the license change aspect is most important: for me personally, "enforcing copyright" is not a particular exciting prospect. w.r.t. "hoarding", I'll point out that (in the context of GCC) being able to enforce copyright is pretty useless IMO. While you can force someone to release their code, the GPL doesn't force them to assign the copyright to the FSF. In practice this means that you can force someone to release their GCC changes, but you can't merge them back to mainline GCC. In a warped way you could argue that the FSF using the GPL encourages their software to fork :-) On Apr 25, 2010, at 10:23 PM, Richard Kenner wrote: >> This would be on topic if the thread were "Why not contribute? (to LLVM)", >> but it isn't. If you're really concerned about LLVM developers, that's one >> thing, but this is certainly not the place to discuss it. > > OK, then I'll rephrase it: > > If the GCC project were to change their policy so that there is no longer > any document signed between the submitter of the code and the FSF, To be perfectly clear, I'm not suggesting that the FSF or GCC project change their policies. I'm just disputing some claims about LLVM system, and pointing out that LLVM and GCC's policies differ because there are substantially different goals involved. The LLVM project is much more focused on the technology and the community, the GCC project is more focused on ensuring software freedom (as defined by the FSF). There isn't anything wrong with having different goals. -Chris
