GnuTLS, copyright assignment, and GNU project governance

GnuTLS, copyright assignment, and GNU project governance

Posted Jan 3, 2013 10:26 UTC (Thu) by dakas (guest, #88146)
In reply to: GnuTLS, copyright assignment, and GNU project governance by rsidd
Parent article: GnuTLS, copyright assignment, and GNU project governance

One could in fact argue that the more the copyright holders, the more stakeholders can pursue legal action against infringement, and the better it is for enforcement.

The enforcement problem is not so much that you need to be sole copyright holder to pursue a violation: any old copyrightable portion will do for that.

The problem is rather that if there are also some portions copyrighted by the defendant, possibly simply because some contributor was being paid by said defendant, the whole case will get thrown out of court due to "dirty hands".

In addition, any such company may choose to require the FSF to stop distributing the software with portions under their copyright.

This is exactly what happened with Gosling Emacs. Richard Stallman was forced to scrap all of the work he had written in good faith built upon the Gosling Emacs extension of his original Emacs macros, and rewrite the Emacs engine from scratch.

You can't exactly blame him for not wanting a repetition of this rather large setback and waste of his own work.

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