Busy busy busybox [LWN.net]

Busy busy busybox

Posted Oct 2, 2006 18:00 UTC (Mon) by landley (guest, #6789)
Parent article: Busy busy busybox

No, the FSF wants to obtain copyrights to the projects it manages so it
has standing when it pursues enforcement actions. If the FSF is not a
copyright holder in a project, they don't have standing to sue somebody
for violating that project's copyrights. The ability to relicense is a
fringe benefit, and if they were willing to rely on it they wouldn't have
bothered with the "or later" language in their suggested permission grant
in the first place.

The SFLC just has some prominent copyright holders sign documents giving
them authority to represent them in license enforcement actions. This
means the SFLC has to take an extra step to establish standing in court,
but it's no big deal.

The main downside of the FSF policy is it's an incredible pain to get a
patch into something like gcc, because all first time contributors have to
sign a physical piece of paper for the FSF to keep on file. (You can't
actually transfer copyrights in the US without a written instrument of
conveyance, and in places like germany with author's rights, you can't
really transfer them at all.)

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I don't buy that argument

Posted Oct 2, 2006 21:57 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

as soon as the FSF owns copyright on a portion of the project they can sue anyone who steals the project.

now if someone only steals a few lines of code and they don't have copyright on those lines they can't, that's true.

however, I've never heard of anyone sueing based on the GPL in such a case. every case I've heard about the offenders took the entire GPL program and used it. In this case you don't have to have copyright on every line to sue (the very sucessful gpl-violations team have been demonstrating this with the linux kernel and it's lack of copyright assignment)

all the FSF would have to do to be able to sue is to stay involved with the project so that as the project changes over time they would still be involved.

the only reason to require the copyright of every line of code is to have the legal right to change the license of that code.