Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

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> I've always wondered how you could "contribute" to an FSF project when it was clear that your "contribution" ended up as 100% their work.

The copyright assignment papers you write aren't as unilateral as you might think. It doesn't say "this belongs to the FSF now, none of it is for you." They're fairly clear in the language and say that the FSF will defend your software and keep it free for everyone, including of course yourself. It's an exchange: you give them your copyright, in return they will use your copyright to forever defend your software from becoming non-free. So your software will always be available to everyone, including yourself. You also only have to sign them once ever; it's not like they require new papers for each contribution you make.

Oh, and you also get a sticker, I think. :-) Due to some legal finnagling, since you're signing your copyright away as part of a contract, you need to receive something of tangible value in return. I think that's why you get back a sticker (or maybe it was dollar bill, I forget).

I don't think the FSF has ever gone to court defending copyleft, but that's not entirely the point. A good weapon can be effective as self-defense merely as a deterrent. It doesn't necessarily have to be fired. Also, the FSF always exhausts all other means to bring about GPL compliance and considers legal action a means of absolutely last resort.

> The copyright assignment papers you write aren't as unilateral as you might think.

It means you are prohibited from using your own code except as how the FSF sees fit. That's what copyright assignment means.

So if you want to take your code and contribute it to a BSD licensed project? Nope. FSF won't allow that. Or use it in a commercial product? Nope. FSF won't allow that.

You can use it in a GPL product, so long as you keep the FSF copyright.

> A good weapon can be effective as self-defense merely as a deterrent.

Sure. And what about Samba?

Nothing prevents the Samba team from joining together collectively and suing someone for violating their license. The fact that other people have contributed small pieces to the code doesn't matter. A GPL license violation is still a violation of the code they own.

e.g my own project: FreeRADIUS. At this point, I've written at least half of the code. If there's a licence violation, I don't need anyone else's permission (or copyright assignment) to go after the violators.

So what, exactly benefit do I gain by submitting code to the FSF, and assigning copyright?

> It means you are prohibited from using your own code except as how the FSF sees fit. That's what copyright assignment means.

The FSF copyright assignment grants you back the right to do what you wish with your code, including sell exceptions.

> So what, exactly benefit do I gain by submitting code to the FSF, and assigning copyright?

Because they'll enforce the GPL on your behalf. I assigned copyright for my GNU project to the FSF for that reason: I have no resources for enforcement. Nor do most people.

> e.g my own project: FreeRADIUS. At this point, I've written at least half of the code. If there's a licence violation, I don't need anyone else's permission (or copyright assignment) to go after the violators.

If there's a violation with _your code_.

If someone uses a portion of your code you don't have copyright over, you have no standing. And _this_ is why the FSF wants full copyright over Emacs.

> If someone uses a portion of your code you don't have copyright over,

Then it's not my code, and I don't have rights on it, do I?

I hope parent commentor clarifies this: do you still get to claim a fork of your contributed code as copyrighted to yourself? The standing problem goes both ways; if you distributed your fork but you had licensed it from the FSF, won't you lack standing from unauthorized use?

>do you still get to claim a fork of your contributed code as copyrighted to yourself?

I believe so - as long as you license it with the GPL.

Yes, you lack standing. The FSF owns copyright.

Is it legally possible to share copyright?

> I hope parent commentor clarifies this

I can't edit my comment; sorry. I meant "your project's code".

So you concede that it doesn't matter if you wrote over half the code? If only there were a mechanism for reaching that other code, so you could defend it...

Oh, wait. Perhaps if those contributors assigned their copyright to you under a very permissive contract...

I don't understand the confusion here. It's not rocket science.

> So you concede that it doesn't matter if you wrote over half the code?

There's just no way you can conclude that from my comments. I explicitely said I could enforce copyright on my code, even if it's only half of the project.

Again, the comment I was replying to said this:

> If someone uses a portion of your code you don't have copyright over,

Does no one see the logical contradiction in that statement?

YOUR code that YOU DON'T OWN.

Uh... then it's not MY CODE, is it? Is that really that hard to figure out?

I'll explain using simple examples, as people apparently aren't getting it.

* If a third-party contributor to my project re-uses his own code elsewhere, I don't care. It's his code.

* If someone violates copyright on a third-party contributors code, again, I don't really care. He's responsible for enforcing copyright on his code. I'm not.

* And if he's contributing code to my project, I'm pretty sure that code is integrated into my project, and is largely useless outside of it. So the odds of a violation of just his code are pretty small.

* If someone infringes on the project as a whole, then I own copyright to the majority, and I can enforce my copyright, independent of anyone else.

* [edit] And if I submit code to the FSF and assign copyright to them, then it's their responsibility to enforce copyright... because they own the copyright. And yes, I have no standing.

Is that clear? Can people please stop down-voting me for pointing out logical inconsistencies?

> The FSF copyright assignment grants you back the right to do what you wish with your code, including sell exceptions.

And can I enforce copyright for those exceptions?

Clearly not, because the FSF owns the copyright.

No, the FSF would have to.

> Nothing prevents the Samba team from joining together collectively and suing someone for violating their license.

It's a lot more work and can be more tricky when there are many different copyright holders. For example, the GPL case against VMWare has hinged on proving that Christoph Hellwig in fact owns the copyright to the lines in ESXi that ended up in VMWare's codebase. He tried to provide git blame output, as I recall, but the court didn't consider this to be sufficient. The case got thrown out, although Hellwig has said he will appeal.

If Linux had a single copyright holder, there would be no need for git blame output and Linux could mount a more effective defense.

> use it in a commercial product? Nope. FSF won't allow that.

The FSF explicitly allows that.

> The assignment contract we normally use has a clause that permits you to use your code in proprietary programs [...] Although we believe that proprietary software is wrong, we include this clause because it would serve no purpose to ask you to promise not to do it. You're giving us a gift in the first place.

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/tree/doc/Copyrig...

And... can you enforce copyright on such a program?

No, because the FSF owns the copyright. They have to do it.

Or maybe the program has mixed copyright (you and the FSF), in which case the same problem (and solution) applies for mixed-copyright software.

So how exactly, does assigning copyright to the FSF make anything better for anyone? It helps the FSF, sure. But everyone else (including the author) is negatively impacted by it.

In contrast, if copyright remains with the author, then the only thing the FSF would lose is the ability to sue for infringement of the code you contributed.

They could still sue for infringement of the code that they own.

> So how exactly, does assigning copyright to the FSF make anything better for anyone? It helps the FSF, sure. But everyone else (including the author) is negatively impacted by it.

The author assigning the copyright benefits from GPL enforcement---enforcement they likely would not have the resources to do themselves.

The code is still free software; the author can continue to use it in other free software projects. Do you have a specific situation in mind where the author might want to still have copyright (aside from a matter of principle) so we can focus on that for discussion?

My use-case is that I want to use the code I write as I see fit, using all of the rights I have available to me. If I assign copyright to the FSF, I lose many of those rights.

So no, it's not about a specific situation. It's about the principle of the thing.

i.e. if the FSF can be founded on the principle of freedom, why can't I claim to believe in the principle of freedom too? And why do I have to give up my rights under the law, in order to give the FSF more freedom for themselves?

> The author assigning the copyright benefits from GPL enforcement---enforcement they likely would not have the resources to do themselves.

The logical conclusion of that statement is that copyright doesn't really matter, whether the license is GPL or not. Violators can ignore the copyright, secure in the confidence that the majority of people won't have the resources to sue.

So why don't we assign copyright for all open source projects to the FSF? After all, if the software is free, it doesn't really matter who the copyright holder is, right? And having someone who can enforce is is good, right?

Yes, I'm playing devil's advocate here. There are unstated assumptions in the FSF's position, and in peoples support of it. I'd like to clarify what those assumptions are, and why they're true (or not).

> So no, it's not about a specific situation. It's about the principle of the thing.

That's fair.

> i.e. if the FSF can be founded on the principle of freedom, why can't I claim to believe in the principle of freedom too?

They're founded on a principle of freedom as defined specifically by the four freedoms.

> The logical conclusion of that statement is that copyright doesn't really matter, whether the license is GPL or not. Violators can ignore the copyright, secure in the confidence that the majority of people won't have the resources to sue.

Yes there's a problem with the Copyright system. But the law does act as a deterrent because there is always risk involved in violating it.

> So why don't we assign copyright for all open source projects to the FSF?

The simple answer: they only accept copyright assignments for GNU projects.

They don't have the staff for enforcing others' copyrights, though; there's other organizations for that, like the Conservancy.

> After all, if the software is free, it doesn't really matter who the copyright holder is, right?

Sure it does: only the Copyright holder has standing in court.

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