Re: The copyright issue

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Richard Stallman writes:

 >     Nope.  It makes him liable to be sued by the FSF for legal
 >     expenses, and maybe the cost of ripping out the code, if the
 >     FSF *loses* (or maybe, if it determines in good faith that it's
 >     going to lose and settles out of court).

 > I can't see why we would ever want to sue a contributor even if he
 > had lied to us about he origin of the code.  We would simply take
 > it out.

Exactly.  So the FSF (more precisely, the project) ends up bearing the
cost in any case.

 > However, the assignments encourage users to think about the
 > question, making it much less likely that we will have any problem.

Maybe.  That assumes contributors understand under what conditions
code they author outside of the workplace using their own resources
might not be theirs.  I know I didn't when I signed, although later
research showed it isn't a problem for me.

I think what really causes people to think about it is when they hand
the disclaimer to their boss and the boss says "I'll have to run this
past corporate legal."