QuantumG wrote:
Not at all. My general statement is that assigning copyright to people who want that copyright assignment so they can make a proprietary distribution of the software is bad.
Copyright assignment lowers the risk to the company. They can never be in a situation where some foolish error leads to them losing rights over the software they are distributing (eg, the error could lead to the copyright holder terminating their GPL license).
Without copyright assignment you'd see less companies willing to open source their code. The lawyers would simply kill it, as they're notoriously risk averse.
It's also better for the developer, as the rights re-assignment to the developer gives them a clear license (eg, it is fruitless for the company to argue that the developer's contribution was a derived work and seek to have copyright assigned to the company and the developer's license terminated).
> Assigning copyright to the FSF is the best thing in the world. > I would suggest that everyone do it.
This is a troll right? There was that marvellous situation with bison where the author of the code disagreed with FSF's interpretation of the GPL but was basically powerless.
There is not a clearly superior strategy for who holds the copyright over GPLed code. It's a vexed question with pluses and minuses to each decision.
The only thing that is clear is that the developer needs a high level of trust in the entity requesting the copyright assignment. After SCO I'm not sure that any of Ray Noorda's current or previous activities engenders the necessary level of trust for me.
Regards, Glen -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
