Re: Relaxing the copyright assignment policy

[Ian Kelling <iank@fsf.org>]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> [[PGP Signed Part:Undecided]]
> Hello Guilers!
>
> Until now, we required copyright for “legally significant¹”
> contributions to Guile to be assigned to the Free Software Foundation
> (FSF).  This requirement did not exist for code not initially written
> for Guile—e.g., (ice-9 match), sxml-match, etc.  The purported advantage
> of copyright assignment is described at
> <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html>.
>
> Your unreachable-but-nonetheless-friendly co-maintainers, Andy Wingo and
> myself, came to the conclusion that the cost/benefit ratio of mandatory
> copyright assignment is not good for Guile.  Like other projects such as
> GCC², we have decided to relax that policy.
>
> Nothing changes for contributors who have already assigned copyright on
> future changes to Guile to the FSF.
>
> New contributors are encouraged to assign copyright to the FSF by
> emailing them one of the forms at
> <https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/plain/doc/Copyright/>,
> especially if they intend to contribute significantly going forward.
>
> New contributors may instead choose to not assign copyright to the FSF.
> In that case, copyright on the new code is held by the contributor
> themself or, possibly, by their employer—contributors who choose this
> option are expected to clarify which of these two applies to their
> situation.  A copyright line for the new copyright holder is added to
> files modified in a “legally significant” way³.
>
> Guile remains under the same license, the GNU Lesser General Public
> License, version 3 or any later version; contributions are expected
> under the same terms.
>
> We hope this to be one of the changes that will make it easier to
> contribute to Guile.
>
> Let us know if you have any questions, and enjoy the good hack!
>
> Ludo’ & Andy.
>
> ¹ https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Legally-Significant
> ² https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-June/236182.html
> ³ https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Copyright-Notices
>
> [[End of PGP Signed Part]]

Hi, I work at FSF as a sysadmin and currently occupy the staff seat on
the board. I just want to add a few points to the conversation.

First, the link you shared, https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html
, says that FSF needs assignment or cooperation from all authors to
enforce. As far as I know, since that was written, legal cases have
shown we can enforce the GPL (not as easily) without some cooperation or
full assignment in some jurisdictions for now. I've asked the FSF
licensing team to update it with the right words.

I mostly wanted to share a relevant link,
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/FSF-copyright-handling .  One point
it brings is that employer copyright disclaimers can be done without
assignments. Even if you don't have a policy of requiring employer
copyright disclaimers, I think it makes sense that for any new
contributors who do not assigning copyright, to ask if they have an
employer who owns the copyright. I know that employers in the US get it
automatically in many cases, and they often have employment contracts
that extend into employee's personal time. If it is the case that an
employer owns the copyright, some natural follow questions to the
contributor would be: Since the employer is probably not going to help
enforce the GPL, how about getting them to either assign it to the FSF
or disclaim their ownership so it will be owned by the contributor?  And
if the contributor wants neither of those, I would ask: do you have some
documentation stating that your employer allows you to distribute their
code to GNU under GPLv3+? If, based on the answers, it seems like the
the contributor might not really have the permission to distribute their
contribution under GPLv3+, then it would probably be a good time to
insist on at least an employer copyright disclaimer.

Don't hesitate to ask the FSF any licensing questions via
licensing@fsf.org . FSF has lawyers and licensing experts (more expert
than me) who will answer your questions.

Guile is wonderful language, especially because it is protected by
GPLv3+ and enforced by FSF if the opportunity arises.

Happy hacking!

-- 
Ian Kelling | Senior Systems Administrator, Free Software Foundation
GPG Key: B125 F60B 7B28 7FF6 A2B7  DF8F 170A F0E2 9542 95DF
https://fsf.org | https://gnu.org