Regarding copyright assignment to FSF

[Damien Zammit <damien@zamaudio.com>]

Hi Ludo,

On 11/8/21 11:01 pm, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> It would be interesting to consider dropping the copyright assignment
> requirement for Hurd/Mach/MiG.  For what remains primarily a hobby
> project, this looks to me like a hindrance more than anything else.

I imagine it is slightly inconvenient for new contributors, but not a hindrance in my opinion.
It ensures that FSF has complete control of the licensing.
For example, how will FSF upgrade the project to GPLv3 if multiple people hold the copyright?
(There are plans to remove the GPLv2-only code btw, as Samuel said).

PS: Why are you promoting a widespread drop of FSF copyright assignment anyway?
In my opinion, FSF is a better steward for copyright authorship than any company would be assuming
you are working on free software on an employer's time and don't mutually agree
with your employer to keep your own authorship.  Even if you do keep it yourself,
it makes it more difficult for anyone to enforce the GPL for that project.
Don't tell me GPL enforcement never happens; for example look at the situation with OpenWRT.
If anything, the lack of GPL enforcement means we need to work harder on it, not give
companies more power over our free software projects.

Damien