Ok, now I finally understand.

but this must be explained in a clear, visible way. This is not at all
clear, anywhere.

What a sad state of affairs we are in regarding these legal aspects.

Thank you.

On Thu, Jul 13, 2017 at 4:12 PM, Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 14, 2017 at 12:16 AM, Filipe Silva <filipe.silva@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > With the recent activity regarding RMS wishing that someone would come up
> > and write a replacement for magit that could be bundled inside emacs, and
> > give FSF the whole copyright assignment, I cannot help but be intrigued:
> > what good do these required copyright assignments do to the free software
> > community?
>
> If you write a package and distribute it under GPL, a malicious user
> can use your code in a derived work and distribute that under a
> non-free license, in violation of GPL.
>
> If you have assigned copyright to FSF, then FSF can sue that violator
> and have a probability of winning and forcing them to either publish
> their improvements under GPL, or stop distributing their derived work.
>
> On the other hand, if you hold the copyright, you will probably not
> have the resources and/or experience to sue, the violator will go
> unpunished, and may successfully compete with you as far as detracting
> users from your project.
>
> One specific case is if you yourself go evil and decide to stop
> distributing your package freely and make it non-free. As a copyright
> holder, you legally can do that. If you are the dominating contributor
> of your package, many of your users will stay with the new evil you.
> And minor contributors will probably not sue because see previous
> paragraph. These things actually happened.
>
> Thus, assigning copyright to FSF protects the project against you going
> evil.
>