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0 pointsbrandmeyer5y ago0 comments

Linux itself has never been a GNU project and has never required copyright assignment. It is the combination of features (retain ownership and GPL) together that has enabled collaboration in Linux.

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8 comments · 1 top-level

hollerith5y ago· 7 in thread

Are you saying that collaboration on Gnu Compiler Collection, binutils, bash, bison, CLISP, coreutils, etc, has been inhibited by the requirement for copyright assignment to the FSF?

brandmeyerOP5y ago

There's a big difference between GNU and Linux in terms of their collaboration. With the exception of GCC, most of the utilities you named have been maintained by a very small group of people.

GCC itself has definitely been inhibited by the copyright assignment. There have been a few different ports that were not upstreamed specifically because of the CLA. AVR32 and C6000 come to mind off the top of my head.

hollerith5y ago

As far as I am aware, the only times contributions were not incorporated were because the work was done by under the terms of an employment contract with the result that the employer ended up owning the copyright, then the employer decided not to sign the CLA.

Can you think of a single instance in which code written by an individual contributor not bound by an employment contract was prevented from being incorporated into a project that required copyright be assigned to a central entity?

I have read multiple accounts of open-source contributors who have successfully negotiated when being hired that copyright to any code written on their own time on the own hardware will remain with them (so as not to complicate their contributions to open-source projects).

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aidenn05y ago

Only one datapoint, but I have refrained from contributing to GNU partly[1] because of the copyright assignment requirement, while having committed to many other open-source projects I use.

1: TBH it's hard to tease apart the cultural aspects from the legal. Most GNU projects were roughly "We'll post a tarball once in a while and not have public CVS" when I first started getting involved in OSS; projects with public CVS it was a lot easier to tell if someone was already was working on something, particularly for people as shy as I was back then; I got the impression that the "proper" thing to do would be to introduce yourself on the mailing list, propose the idea, &c. and then start working on a patch.

My particular combination of low-confidence and misanthropy steered me away from such projects.

duskwuff5y ago

I'm sure it has. It's an additional hurdle that developers have to clear before they get their code included upstream -- it would be extremely surprising if there weren't some number of developers who gave up at that point.

(It doesn't help that the FSF's processes for copyright assignment are incredibly clunky. It was a big deal when they started accepting scanned papers in 2012, for example.)

monocasa5y ago

The FSF is not Google. Their organizational goals are different enough that the repercussions of copyright assignment are different in each of those cases.

Basically I trust the FSF to stand by the spirit of open source. I don't trust that out of Google.

loeg5y ago

Sure. I don't contribute to projects that require copyright assignment to the FSF. For one thing, it's a major hassle for new contributors. For another, I don't particularly like or trust the FSF.

ori_b5y ago

To a large degree, yes. I have definitely not bothered sending patches to these projects because I can't be bothered with copyright assignment.

And that's with trust that the FSFs goals on copyright align with mine.

I don't trust Google to do what I want with my assigned copyright.

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