On 13.07.2017 21:12, Yuri Khan wrote: > On Fri, Jul 14, 2017 at 12:16 AM, Filipe Silva 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. What would stop FSF to assist defending the authors rights? Why FSF might not take over the risk of a sue than, provide layers etc.? > 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. Could you point me at some example? AFAIK from a case sue has been brought forward by the individual author at his own risk, not by FSF. > > 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.