Canonical copyright assignment policy 'same as others' (ITWire)

This is the difference between a community project and a project that is owned by a corporation that happens to have an OSI approved license.

A community project becomes something bigger than any one member of the community. Linux is a good example. While Linus is certainly very important, if Linus decided to work for Microsoft tomorrow, Linux would still continue to flourish.

MySQL is a good example of the later. It's in a very sorry state right now because of the Oracle acquisition of Sun. It's not about licensing and forking. It's about centralization. Distribution of copyright and contributions results in robustness.

It's not about the quality of one contribution verses another. It's about profit. The desire is to keep the options open to make a profit by releasing proprietary versions of a project. If this was done by making a project BSD licensed, at least everyone would have the ability to do this. However, copyright assignment means that just the assignee has this right. That's just plain wrong as far as I'm concerned.

I can't see myself ever contributing to a project that requires copyright assignment to anything other than a non-profit foundation. I have no desire to help enable someone else to obtain a monopoly over my work.