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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 21:40 UTC (Tue) by bkuhn (subscriber, #58642)In reply to: A bit of a mountain out of a molehill, I think. by corbet Parent article: When does the FSF own your code? 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 :).
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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.
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