Kuhn: It Matters Who Owns Your Copylefted Copyrights

Bradley Kuhn has posted a lengthy missive on the Software Freedom Conservancy blog about the hazards of distributed copyright ownership.

As a result, in debates about copyright ownership, discussions of what policy contributors want regarding the fruits of their labor is sadly moot. Without a clear, organized mitigation strategy to assure that FOSS contributors keep their own copyrights, a project (such as GCC or glibc) that switches from a standing “(nearly) all copyrights assigned to a charity” model to a plain Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) or naked inbound=outbound contributor arrangement will, after a period of years, mostly likely to have copyrights that are primarily held by the employers of the most prolific contributors, rather than by the contributors themselves.

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