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A bit of a mountain out of a molehill, I think.A bit of a mountain out of a molehill, I think.Posted Mar 19, 2013 16:32 UTC (Tue) by bkuhn (subscriber, #58642)Parent article: When does the FSF own your code?
Speaking as a member of FSF's Board of Directors, I can tell you that the FSF copyright assignment agreement is under near-constant review, and has been for decades. The agreement can be canceled by the developer and further changes made thereafter wouldn't be assigned. It sounds to me like Jambunathan is exploring whether or not he wants to cancel this assignment. That's his right, but it's interesting to note that Jambunathan hasn't canceled yet. Presumably, he is exploring the cost-benefit analysis as to whether he'd like his new code to continue to be concluded in the FSF's canonical distribution of Emacs or not. Anyway, it's unfortunate the Corbet's article above doesn't reiterate the advantages of assigning to FSF to developers. Specifically, the FSF takes on the obligation of being the publisher of the code (which can sometimes be a dangerous act in today's world), and also, FSF handles enforcement of the GPL for the codebase. Finally, FSF gives a liberal license back to the developer (i.e., Jambunathan could have always made proprietary software out of his own assigned works after doing the assignment), and FSF further promises never to publish a proprietary version of the software itself. Finally, given the liberal license grant-back and the realities of the general nature of private changes, the comment in the article about what happens with private changes seems like a red herring to me.
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A bit of a mountain out of a molehill, I think. Posted Mar 19, 2013 17:05 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] Hmm...a few points:
A bit of a mountain out of a molehill, I think. Posted Mar 19, 2013 20:23 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
I thought the article illustrated the concerns well, and even reiterated them in the concluding paragraph. Not sure why Bradley's response missed them entirely.
Personally I'm really glad the article didn't "reiterate the advantages of assigning to FSF to developers." Even if the grumpy editor could make it interesting (it's possible!), that's hardly news.
A bit of a mountain out of a molehill, I think. Posted Mar 19, 2013 20:56 UTC (Tue) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]
I'm not sure I follow.
Suppose this was not Emacs. Suppose this was KDE (copyleft, no copyright assignment) or Xorg (non-copyleft).
A contributor commits code to one of the version-control repositories of those projects. As soon as this was done, the code is already published. He can't (legally) retract the code that was published (Right? AINAL). You don't need any extra permission from the author to use that code.
A bit of a mountain out of a molehill, I think. Posted Mar 19, 2013 21:35 UTC (Tue) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link] True, but it is emacs, and that project requires a copyright assignment. If the author can withdraw that assignment, the project (and everyone else) would still have the right to use the code under the relevant Free software licence, but this project would have to reject it, or waive it's own rules on requiring assignment, so in this case it makes a difference to the project.
contributions without copyright assignment Posted Mar 22, 2013 22:06 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] A contributor commits code to one of the version-control repositories of those projects. As soon as this was done, the code is already published. He can't (legally) retract the code that was published (Right? AINAL). You don't need any extra permission from the author to use that code. I've always wondered about that. I don't think "published" affects anything at all except for when the clock starts for copyright expiration. I like to think that when someone sends a patch to a project mailing list and says, "here's a patch," but does not mention copyright at all, that there is some kind of copyright assignment or license implied, but I wonder just what, and a part of me says that under those circumstances, the project has no rights at all. I've heard of companies that immediately delete patches sent to them for their non-open-source products for fear of violating copyright by even accidentally using them.
A bit of a mountain out of a molehill, I think. Posted Mar 19, 2013 21:40 UTC (Tue) by bkuhn (subscriber, #58642) [Link] Jon Corbet wrote:by signing the FSF's agreement, one may be giving away ownership of code that was never intended to be submitted to the project, and even RMS can't say where the boundaries are. The FSF's "liberal license grant-back" (30-day notice required) may be cold comfort in such cases. I believe that issue is worthy of attention and discussion. Difficult questions about scope of copyright are always likely to receive a The FSF's "liberal license grant-back" (30-day notice required) may be cold comfort in such cases. I'd note your article doesn't say which cases you're talking about here where the license grant-back wouldn't solve the perceived problem. AFAICT, (and admittedly IANAL and TINLA), about the only thing one can't do with the license grant-back is enforce the copyright license itself (e.g., enforce the GPL). There's been a debate about the question of assignors wanting to take back GPL enforcement for themselves instead of entrusting FSF to do it, but if you're trying to relate this discussion to that one, you're being awfully (and unnecessarily) circumspect about it. And, if we're talking future works, the author could cancel the agreement anyway for future works, and then have copyright control going forward regardless. What Jambunathan is exploring is how he can stir the anthill, make a mess, and get attention. That's not really relevant here either. If you believe that it's not relevant, I'm now pretty confused why you'd use it as the primary example in your article at all. I understand you want to raise an important issue, but why use an example that you agree is designed to make mountains out of anthills (to mix our two metaphors fully :).
A bit of a mountain out of a molehill, I think. Posted Mar 20, 2013 12:47 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] Bradley, how about the simple case where you want to own the copyright to your own code? Or what if you want to contribute it to a different project which also requires copyright assignment? I don't get why "I wouldn't want the FSF to claim ownership of code I never intended to submit to it" is such a hard thing to understand?As for why I used this example, that is easy: because it was there and easy to understand. Even a gadfly might raise an interesting issue.
A bit of a mountain out of a molehill, I think. Posted Mar 21, 2013 13:53 UTC (Thu) by bkuhn (subscriber, #58642) [Link] Jon Corbet wrote: how about the simple case where you want to own the copyright to your own code? Then don't sign the copyright assignment form in the first place, and cancel it if you change your mind.
"I wouldn't want the FSF to claim ownership of code I never intended to submit to it" is such a hard thing to understand? This is the question that RMS said himself needed further study. I can't speak for him — nor am I privy to any internal FSF discussions on this issue at this point — but I'd suspect that FSF would want to figure out a way to be flexible if possible. Indeed, I am privy to many discussions inside FSF that have been ongoing about trying to be more accommodating to the needs of contributors to FSF-copyrighted projects. However, these questions and issues are complex, FSF is a small and underfunded org with a very small staff, and therefore FSF can't change complex, time-honored policies quickly like a wealthy, for-profit company could with lots of resources to hire a team of lawyers to study complex legal questions. Most of FSF's lawyers, by contrast, are pro-bono and don't always have time to spare to give advice.
A bit of a mountain out of a molehill, I think. Posted Mar 22, 2013 4:21 UTC (Fri) by rusty (✭ supporter ✭, #26) [Link]
Your article *was* something of a beat-up, Jon.
The question at what point submissions can be revoked is a general one, not tied to CLAs, and it's come up in the past (eg. in Samba). The musing about whether the FSF owns copyright on stuff you haven't submitted seems both unimportant and an invitation to armchair lawyery.
Now, I don't like CLAs either, but this didn't really add any useful data. It read more like FSF-baiting :(
Cheers,
Not really a beat-up Posted Apr 3, 2013 16:32 UTC (Wed) by ARealLWN (guest, #88901) [Link]
IMHO I didn't feel the article was really a beat-up. It might have brought up issues that have been raised before but I feel that those might be seen in a different light given the recent events mentioned. I do feel that "The question at what point submissions can be revoked is a general one, not tied to CLAs, and it's come up in the past" is indeed a valid point but I also feel that copyright assignment and when it occurs is an important issue which is worth mentioning when it arises. Please forgive me if I repeated myself in this post.
A bit of a mountain out of a molehill, I think. Posted Mar 21, 2013 12:40 UTC (Thu) by richmoore (subscriber, #53133) [Link]
> It sounds to me like Jambunathan is exploring whether or not he wants to
> cancel this assignment. That's his right,
That's a very different response to the one that was given to the gnutls maintainer http://lwn.net/Articles/529560/
Rich.
A bit of a mountain out of a molehill, I think. Posted Mar 21, 2013 13:47 UTC (Thu) by bkuhn (subscriber, #58642) [Link] Rich wrote: That's a very different response to the one that was given to the gnutls maintainer. Rich, I believe that you're conflating two different issues: one is about a copyright assignment and the other is about a formal volunteer role with the GNU project.
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