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

Posted Feb 1, 2010 2:31 UTC (Mon) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
In reply to: Canonical copyright assignment policy 'same as others' (ITWire) by Baylink
Parent article: Canonical copyright assignment policy 'same as others' (ITWire)

There is a distinction between the assignments the FSF asks for, and the assignments that other companies ask for. The FSF, in return for the contribution, signs a legally binding contract with the contributor that assures that the code will remain free; furthermore, you're contributing to an organization that doesn't do proprietary software and never will. However, the reason Sun wanted copyright assignments was to allow them to use the contributions in proprietary software but to bar competitors from doing the same.

Of course another option is to have everyone keep their copyrights. But then if some reason comes up where almost all the contributors agree that the license needs to be changed (perhaps you really need to link in code with an incompatible license; perhaps some court had decided that your license means something different than you thought it did), it's really, really hard; maybe some of your contributors are not even reachable.