Re: Adding advisory notification for non-ELPA package.el downloads

[Paul Rankin <hello@paulwrankin.com>]

On Fri, 21 Jul 2017, at 12:20 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: Paul Rankin <hello@paulwrankin.com>
> > Cc: rms@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> > Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2017 00:01:48 +1000
> > 
> > On Thu, 20 Jul 2017, at 11:42 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > > I think you might misunderstand the nature and the essence of the
> > > copyright assignment: it doesn't in any way diminish the author's
> > > rights on his/her code.  Here's a direct citation from
> > > 
> > >  https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2014/spring/copyright-assignment-at-the-fsf
> > > 
> > >   Sometimes contributors are concerned about giving up rights to their
> > >   work. As the assignment is a gift to the free software community,
> > >   they don't want it to come at the expense of having flexibility in
> > >   the use of their own code. Thus, we grant back to contributors a
> > >   license to use their work as they see fit. This means they are free
> > >   to modify, share, and sublicense their own work under terms of their
> > >   choice. This enables contributors to redistribute their work under
> > >   another free software license. While this technically also permits
> > >   distributing their work under a proprietary license, we hope they
> > >   won't.
> > > 
> > > I can confirm that every one of my assignments I got back signed by
> > > the FSF includes a specific clause about the above rights granted back
> > > to me.
> > 
> > Eli you've missed the point completely.
> 
> Maybe so, but then how about explaining what I missed?
> 
> From my POV, you expressed a concern about giving up the rights for
> your code, and I pointed out that by assigning you don't give up any
> rights.  Given that Clément pointed out the "Author" and/or "Written
> by" records in the sources, what other concerns remain?

Copyright is not merely functional, and you're reducing it to even
lesser functional purposes by arguing that given assigning copyright to
the FSF retains the subset of functional purposes of copyright that are
important to you, then they are effectively the same and should be
treated the same for everyone. Copyright is not its function, rather its
functions arise as the manifestations of the importance we see in
authorship as ownership. That's a symbolic importance, and while that
may not mean much to you, it's where all the functional purposes above
come from. Owning a thing, and having rights to that thing as if you
owned it, are not the same thing.