[Sussex] GPL and copyright

[Chris Jones]

Hi

On Wed, 6 July, 2005 15:06, Geoffrey Teale said:
> them copyright  - the only difference to them is that they can then choose

Aren't there some arguments about a consistent body of copyright being
easier to defend than having to track down dozens of people who own a
copyright on the odd line here and there to fight your case?

> license that code under another license (i.e. not GPL, which is what the
> CUPS guys are up to) .

You say that like there's something underhand about it ;)

> code or any derived work.  If you hand copyright to the FSF then you must
> realise that you will not be able to use your code outside the terms of

You could license it to yourself under more favourable terms before
assigning the copyright, I would think?

> Assigning copyright to the FSF is perfectly safe unless you wish to use
> the code in non-GPL projects (which is your right as the copyright

and don't mind them changing the license. I once started a (doomed)
project on savannah and I explicitly marked the license as GPL version 2,
rather than "version 2 or later" as the FSF preferrs and they were
actually very pushy to persuade me to change it to the "or later" version.
I did relent because it wasn't very important, but really you shouldn't be
giving someone else that kind of power - god only knows what Stallman and
Moglen will stuff into v3.

Personally I would never assign copyright to the FSF on a whole project,
but I would be happy to assign copyright away for additions/modifications
to an existing program - if I'm just patching something then I'm going to
always have a copy of it under the GPL, so unless I've written some
significant original code then I'm not really losing anything by assigning
the copyright, but the project involved gains cohesion and some
flexibility (even if that is to fork a closed source version, not that
they can ever revoke the GPL'd version).

> I'll reiterate that handing it to the FSF is completely safe so long as
> you don't wish to use your code in non-GPL applications.

And you trust the FSF. I would say that handing code over to anyone is the
same deal, you lose control either way. Whether they put it in a
commercial project tomorrow or in 10 years time or never is no longer
anything to do with you and I see no reason to assume the FSF is going to
hold to the current ideals forever ;)

Cheers,
-- 
Chris Jones
  cmsj at tenshu.net
   www.tenshu.net