Re: Overview of copyright issues + Debian

[Graham Percival]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 11:07:06PM +0100, Anthony W. Youngman wrote:
> In message <address@hidden>, Reinhold  
> Kainhofer <address@hidden> writes
>> ... So we'll have the same problem again in some years... By then it will be
>> even harder tracking down all contributors, who submitted a patch years 
>> ago...
>>
> Hopefully we won't. Hopefully contributors will use the "or later"  
> version.
>
> But the problem with *demanding* "or later" is that you are *forcing*  
> potential contributors to give the FSF carte blanche to relicence their  
> work. Why should I, having given long and careful thought to the licence  
> I want for my code, allow other people to change those terms without as  
> much as a "by your leave"? I'm not saying I agree with Linus, but he has  
> his reasons for licencing Linux as "v2 only", and I'm sure there'll be  
> people who think he has a valid point!

Sweet Mao, I actually agree with Anthony about something!  :)

Yeah, I've always been troubled by this.  I think[1] that
technically, if somebody assasinated enough FSF members, and/or
bought a million FSF memberships or whatever... whatever would be
required to replace the current board with their minions... they
could release a GPLv4 that states "all your base are belong to us,
and that source code can be used by SCO in any way they see fit".

[1]  I haven't looked into the actual mechanisms behind the "or
later" clause, or the exact process by which the FSF chooses new
board members.  It would make an *awesome* webcomic, though...
maybe I should so some research into this, find somebody to draw
the thing, and create an *awesome* comic about valient open-source
developers fighting against such a take-over of the FSF.  I could
write an *awesome* story for that comic.


Hey, Valentin?  You're not really busy these days, are you?  And
your little lilypond note icon is cute.  Want to make a webcomic
together?  ;)

Cheers,
- Graham