Lack of developers delays OpenOffice.org (ComputerWorld) [LWN.net]

Lack of developers delays OpenOffice.org (ComputerWorld)

Posted Apr 20, 2005 14:12 UTC (Wed) by Ross (subscriber, #4065)
In reply to: Lack of developers delays OpenOffice.org (ComputerWorld) by nathan
Parent article: Lack of developers delays OpenOffice.org (ComputerWorld)

You are both wrong. The assignment is a contract, of course. The copyright
does go to the FSF, but the FSF licenses back all of the original rights so
you can still use your work in a proprietary work or whatever. However the
contract forbids the FSF from releasing the work under a non-GPL license so
you don't have to worry about them turning into a company or something. And,
as you said, you always have access to the work based on any license you
distributed it with before the assignment of copyright.

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Lack of developers delays OpenOffice.org (ComputerWorld)

Posted Apr 20, 2005 20:26 UTC (Wed) by hmmm (guest, #28931) [Link]

Its the stupid, stupid.

This is on a per application basis. Something like GCC expects you to sign over copyright for any contributions you want included into their distribution. You can always take their code, add you modifications, keep your copyright and distribute it without any problems, but if you want your code to make it into GCC 4.0 you need to sign over copyright so they can legally enforce the GPL on their software.

The FSF does not do this. The copyright owners do this. The same thing happens for the Linux kernel.

Lack of developers delays OpenOffice.org (ComputerWorld)

Posted Apr 21, 2005 0:49 UTC (Thu) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

The FSF certainly does do this. Or, if you prefer, the GNU project does.
All non-trivial changes require copyright assignment to the FSF in order to
be incorporated into the FSF-distributed version. Of course you an fork,
as that is your right under the GPL; that has nothing to do with who holds
the copyright.