> I do understand the rationale for the FSF's desire to hold copyright, > and have a paper trail. But, at this point, I think that's making it > harder to people to participate, and with no real benefit. The FSF is > clinging to an outmoded policy due to a single occurrence from long ago.
I disagree. From what I see of the industry and its practices, I think the risk of an attack on Free Software due to lack of providence issues is INCREASING, not decreasing. As FLOSS software makes more and more inroads into the commercial world, proprietary software companies will feel more and more threatened and the way most companies react to threats nowadays is via legal attacks. We've had companies (e.g., SCO) in the past who transitioned from being software companies to legal firms. It would not surprise me at all if one or more compiler companies did something similar in the next decade.
