Re: willing to contribute verrevcmp to gnulib?

[Ian Jackson]

AJ: the FSF want to put an implementation of the dpkg version
comparison algorithm into gnulib.  I approve of this, but the git logs
say that the current version was supplied by you.  There are some
copyright questions.

Jim Meyering writes ("Re: willing to contribute verrevcmp to gnulib?"):
> Bruno was noting that you are listed as the copyright holder.

Listed by who ?  In the source tarball ?  I see the copyright notice
at the top of the individual file has not been updated but this is not
unusual.  Obviously I'm more meticulous about this with my own
projects but I'm not currently one of the dpkg maintainers.

According to

 
http://git.debian.org/?p=dpkg/dpkg.git;a=commitdiff;h=dba844bd36a18e6abb9e8fc6bb7eff5cb0de4347;hp=cb324560fd600a1a20cb7c930c025879c543e43a

the implementation you want was written by Anthony Towns.

> I know it can seem silly, but it's better if the FSF is the copyright
> holder.  Would you be willing to assign copyright to the FSF?

As I understand it the purpose of assigning the copyright to the FSF
is so that the FSF can take enforcement action against violators
without needing to contact all the authors.  But I think such an
assignment would prevent the original author from enforcing the
copyright themselves ?

Is there some other arrangement that would allow either the author or
the FSF to enforce the copyright ?  For example the author could
appoint the FSF or the SFLC as their attorney.

This all seems quite a lot of fuss over 20 lines of code!

Ian.