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From: Brad Hards <bhards@bigpond.net.au>
To: Daniel Berlin <dberlin@dberlin.org>, Xavier Bestel <xavier.bestel@free.fr>
Subject: Re: Bitkeeper outrage, old and new
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 08:51:46 +1000
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Cc: Robert Love <rml@tech9.net>, Ben Collins <bcollins@debian.org>,
       Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com>, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>,
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On Mon, 21 Oct 2002 08:47, Daniel Berlin wrote:

> 2+ people having copyrights on something only occurs when you have
> joint authorship (or rare partial transfers).
> In this case, what we have is the a transfer of copyright from you, to
> the FSF ("my entire right, title, and interest (including all rights
> under copyright))"
> It's like transferring rights to real property (in most countries, you
> can view copyright as an object of property in trying to determine what
> you can do with it)
> When rights are transferred to another party, the original author
> doesn't get any residual rights unless these are expressly reserved as
> a "grant back".
> You are no longer the owner of the copy right.
Which is the whole point of the FSF copyright assignment. They don't want you 
to relicense it under some other terms. Under the GPL it doesn't matter who 
owns the copyright, so the only point of the copyright assignment is to 
reduce _your_ rights.

I understand why the FSF want to do this (imagine a major free-software 
producer in financial trouble, and a big product (eg GCC and binutils) that 
they could sell to a closed-source vendor). I just don't plan to do this 
myself.

Brad

- -- 
http://linux.conf.au. 22-25Jan2003. Perth, Aust. I'm registered. Are you?
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