if copyright assignment is so evil, why don't you oppose FSF requiring it?

Posted Feb 1, 2010 3:32 UTC (Mon) by AndreE (guest, #60148)
In reply to: if copyright assignment is so evil, why don't you oppose FSF requiring it? by dlang
Parent article: Canonical copyright assignment policy 'same as others' (ITWire)

Canonical is a for-profit company. Their comittment is to shareholders, not to any community or ideology.

The Free Software Foundation is ostensibly committed to the ideologies around the Free Software Movement.

It's all a question of trust. I trust a promiment and zealous advocacy group way more than a commercial entity whose interest in protecting freedom is mostly defined commerically. Even when RMS dies there are many individuals fully committed to libre software movement and I doubt any sort of subversive attempt to make the FSF adopt a more proprietary-friendly stance would go unchecked.

This doesn't just go for Canonical. Any company in the Linux space is ultimately less trust worthy than the FSF.

if copyright assignment is so evil, why don't you oppose FSF requiring it?

Posted Feb 1, 2010 4:06 UTC (Mon) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (5 responses)

RMS and the FSF have actively held back the improvement of developers'
lives out of an insane need for arbitrary Freedom (look how long it took for
GCC to get plugin support), and that alone makes them wholly untrustworthy
to me.

if copyright assignment is so evil, why don't you oppose FSF requiring it?

Posted Feb 1, 2010 5:06 UTC (Mon) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [Link] (3 responses)

Without the FSF, we wouldn't have a high-quality free compiler at all.

if copyright assignment is so evil, why don't you oppose FSF requiring it?

Posted Feb 1, 2010 5:26 UTC (Mon) by nevyn (guest, #33129) [Link] (2 responses)

> Without the FSF, we wouldn't have a high-quality free compiler at all.

That's obviously false, it's like saying without the FSF we wouldn't have a
high-quality free editor. Yes, RMS and the FSF helped GCC along and it is
still the de-facto free compiler but other people have written compilers and
Cygnus (and others) have put a huge amount of effort into it.

if copyright assignment is so evil, why don't you oppose FSF requiring it?

Posted Feb 1, 2010 10:08 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

You can't oppose the FSF and Cygnus.

Cygnus (and now Red Hat) have largely been successful because they've embraced the GPL and worked with the FSF instead of trying to cross it as many others did and still try to do.

Some people are so set in their no-FSF or no-RMS world they do not realise that in practice working with the FSF or RMS is not the disaster they paint.

if copyright assignment is so evil, why don't you oppose FSF requiring it?

Posted Feb 2, 2010 5:19 UTC (Tue) by SEJeff (guest, #51588) [Link]

fwiw, between pcc from the bsd camp and llvm, we have healthy competition for
gcc. Granted gcc is still light years ahead of both, but we have competition.
In the end, competition is good for all free or not.

if copyright assignment is so evil, why don't you oppose FSF requiring it?

Posted Feb 1, 2010 5:39 UTC (Mon) by AndreE (guest, #60148) [Link]

I never claimed that it was solution to solve all problems.

Ultimately though, the FSF didn't just decide to make new releases of GCC under a less free license, like any commercial entity might consider. In fact, their zeal is appealing to me. You may consider it "arbitrary" freedom, but having entities that place the freedom of software as their primary concern are obviously the entities mostly like to always protect these freedoms.

if copyright assignment is so evil, why don't you oppose FSF requiring it?

Posted Feb 1, 2010 13:47 UTC (Mon) by skvidal (guest, #3094) [Link] (1 responses)

Canonical is a privately held company. They aren't beholding to anyone necessarily.

One of the virtues of being privately held is doing what you want/think is right BEFORE answering to shareholders.

if copyright assignment is so evil, why don't you oppose FSF requiring it?

Posted Feb 1, 2010 15:45 UTC (Mon) by andrel (guest, #5166) [Link]

In practice private corporations are more answerable to shareholders than public companies. Canonical's shareholder runs the company as he sees fit.

Companies have a purpose, specified in their initial paperwork...

Posted Feb 1, 2010 14:14 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Actually a company can be set up with arbitrary rules. It's unlikely that you'd manage to IPO a company with rules that made commercial success very difficult to achieve, but nothing stops a private company (and Canonical is a private company) from having such rules.

It is very common for people (even supposedly "smart" stock market people) to imagine that all for-profits are somehow interchangeable profit hunting outfits, mercenaries willing to do anything to make a buck and differentiated only in where they're starting from in that hunt. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. Nearly all companies have specific goals outside of "make a profit".

Of course the owners (in total) of the company can wind it up and start over, but that's uncommon and cannot be forced by a single greedy shareholder in a public company. It's also very easy to engineer things so that a radical change would trigger "change of control" conditions, break contracts with partners and release key employees under favourable conditions. An unpopular change in this case would be corporate "suicide".