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From: Filipe Silva <filipe.silva@gmail.com>
To: Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>
Cc: Emacs developers <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
Subject: Re: Please explain the FSF copyright assignment thing
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2017 16:23:24 -0300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAEwkUWNwmi0SPTTtxzA1Z-GBvifyn8uiDuOE5XaTRjaN=Y9J+g@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAP_d_8UoXS0pU9rCCCMctd=Q_S+PiQ1HHoBB3bkWiS6Ft=m6aQ@mail.gmail.com>

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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.
>

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  reply	other threads:[~2017-07-13 19:23 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 31+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
     [not found] <CAEwkUWP29A+L2g5i2asCd8Qb2PS1zvhPrsaeEN93tGt-5M05jg@mail.gmail.com>
     [not found] ` <CAEwkUWN8+N6B6uacvXvPeLHwU6RjMYVc3DGZiCexHePUpMPphw@mail.gmail.com>
     [not found]   ` <CAEwkUWN4NUEoBe5JotLctkF=FLG2N6qpknmpncrg8uWehLUSyw@mail.gmail.com>
     [not found]     ` <CAEwkUWOSeK-yny-9qft4yTb=0H3EbXK7atqL9ifoGOnfZt_z7Q@mail.gmail.com>
     [not found]       ` <CAEwkUWMLL8YqiRdqtthgKEzcyn69Ji_bNuq-x0Z-h+MqQKfuUA@mail.gmail.com>
     [not found]         ` <CAEwkUWPD1T7MLAcDPduSpXm34e-GzjFxrcrZat4a0s0fTarrUA@mail.gmail.com>
2017-07-13 17:16           ` Please explain the FSF copyright assignment thing Filipe Silva
2017-07-13 17:49             ` Óscar Fuentes
2017-07-13 18:06               ` Filipe Silva
2017-07-13 18:25               ` John Yates
2017-07-13 18:32                 ` Filipe Silva
2017-07-13 18:36                 ` Karl Fogel
2017-07-13 18:48                   ` Filipe Silva
2017-07-13 19:08                     ` Karl Fogel
2017-07-13 19:11                       ` Filipe Silva
2017-07-13 19:12                     ` Paul Eggert
2017-07-13 19:42                 ` Óscar Fuentes
2017-07-14  5:59                   ` Eli Zaretskii
2017-07-13 19:12             ` Yuri Khan
2017-07-13 19:23               ` Filipe Silva [this message]
2017-07-13 19:31                 ` Richard Copley
2017-07-13 19:56                   ` Filipe Silva
2017-07-13 20:07                     ` Richard Copley
2017-07-15  1:36                     ` Richard Stallman
2017-07-15  1:36                 ` Richard Stallman
2017-07-13 20:15               ` Dmitry Gutov
2017-07-14 10:12                 ` Yuri Khan
2017-07-14 12:17                   ` Dmitry Gutov
2017-07-18  6:16               ` Andreas Röhler
2017-07-18  7:53                 ` Paul Eggert
2017-07-18 17:04                   ` Andreas Röhler
2017-07-18 17:42                     ` Stefan Monnier
2017-07-19  3:32                       ` Richard Stallman
2017-07-19  9:20                         ` Andreas Röhler
2017-07-19 11:56                           ` tomas
2017-07-19 14:34                           ` Richard Stallman
2017-07-14  1:20             ` Richard Stallman

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