On Thu, Jun 21, 2001 at 03:17:16PM -0400, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> IANAL, but I believe that Linus's position as anthology copyright holder
> makes him privileged in this respect.
Regardless of what you find in the books, recall that Linus has
stated that decentralizing the copyright of Linux was a goal, so you
may not find him willing to claim an "anthology copyright" (if such
a thing even applies to the kernel, which in my NAL opinion, it does
not).
>From http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Torvalds/linus1998.shtml:
Torvalds: And when somebody sends me big patches, I don't ask
them to assign the copyright over to me. So right now for
example, the kernel itself has probably on the order of 50 or
100 copyright holders and the actual copyright license has
always been the same. It's the GPL that requires that sources
always be available. So in order to make a version of Linux
that is not under that license, you have to get all those
copyright holders to agree to the new license. The parts of the
kernel that I own completely are significant, but they aren't
enough to really make a good system. I did that consciously. I
wanted to bind my own hands so that even if people don't trust
me personally, they trust the fact that even if I wanted to
turn commercial, I couldn't.
Andrew
(Feeling stupid for quoting Linus and Cc:ing Linus.)
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