Copyright Assignment Meh [LWN.net]

Copyright Assignment Meh

Posted Nov 10, 2010 6:42 UTC (Wed) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281)
In reply to: Copyright Assignment Meh by martinfick
Parent article: LPC: Michael Meeks on LibreOffice and code ownership

> But they don't get those freedoms on the same program then.

Ok, fine, then we basically agree on all the facts. We're just confusing ourselves with language.

I care that they *can* get all those freedoms for that source code - they might need to get it from somewhere else though. You care about getting those freedoms for the actual program they receive. Neither of us is right or wrong, just different focus.

> Please don't take this the wrong way, but perhaps you are not familiar with the concept of copyleft?

Actually I've been advocating for copyleft, and writing copylefted code, for quite a long time now :)

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Posted Nov 10, 2010 17:36 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

>I care that they *can* get all those freedoms for that source code - they might need to get it from somewhere else though

They can get all of those freedoms if the code is released under a BSD license, so why choose the GPL in the first place if you don't care about the copyleft terms that the GPL adds?

Posted Nov 10, 2010 18:42 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

Indeed even has contributors to a GPL or proprietary licensed codebase, as an individual contributor you can offer your contributions under a more liberal license such as BSD and a project should be able to accept them even if they don't require copyright assignment. If your personal politics are such that the terms of the GPL( or proprietary licensing) are too restrictive for you, then you are still free to offer your original work under a more expansive license such as the BSD and a GPL( or proprietary) project can consume those contributions without issue even in situations where they later feel a re-license is necessary. BSD licensed contributions should present no insurmountable problems even in a re-licensing situation.

-jef