Re: Regarding copyright assignment to FSF

[Michael Banck]

Hi,

On Thu, Aug 12, 2021 at 12:18:20PM +1000, Damien Zammit wrote:
> On 11/8/21 11:01 pm, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> > It would be interesting to consider dropping the copyright assignment
> > requirement for Hurd/Mach/MiG.  For what remains primarily a hobby
> > project, this looks to me like a hindrance more than anything else.
> 
> I imagine it is slightly inconvenient for new contributors, but not a
> hindrance in my opinion.

The fact that this process potentially or apparently took (or rather,
has been taking) months for Sergey (I don't know when it was initiated),
is a pretty good indicator that it is more than a nuisance.

> It ensures that FSF has complete control of the licensing.

I don't mind that, but I also think the Hurd is not a tactical FSF asset
anymore that needs to be kept under tight control. The FSF has enough
copyright in the Hurd that it can enforce it whenever it likes, even if
other people's copyrighted code (as is already the case with the pfinet
stack) is added. Finally, the GPLv2+ code can always be licensed to
GPLv3+ once all the GPLv2only code has been removed, no copyright
assignments are required there, either.

So if the Hurd maintainers would like to drop the requirement (as has
been done with GCC and glibc in recent months), I would support that.


Michael