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Comment by gardnr | Hacker News Reader

This is owned by Atlassian. After you submit a pull request they send you a huge contributor agreement saying that all your contributions are owned by Atlassian. Fuck that.

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Looks like it’s 8x8 https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/29/atlassian-sells-jitsi-an-o...

This is a pretty common thing to do – even the FSF does this for GNU projects.

The FSF situation is a bit different, assigning your copyrights to them is making a donation to charity. They also allow you to take back the copyright at any time.

At least originally, the reason for assigning copyright (and signing a waiver) was because there were some high profile cases of employers claiming that some contributions were owned by them when employees did work in their spare time. I believe it was RMS who decided that legally it was just safer to ask for copyright assignment. I believe that he later relaxed significantly on the position, but I think it's still common practice on GNU projects.

it was my understanding that the reason for copyright assignment was that the FSF believed it would be difficult to defend the copyright of a project if it was owned by multiple people.

with several high profile cases in the linux kernel i think this belief has been shown to be overcautious and maybe this has led to a relaxation of the position.

That sounds very reasonable. It's very possible that I'm wrong.

i'd like to point out that your theory sounds just as reasonable, and the truth will only be found by checking actual FSF sources

Out of curiosity how do they allow you to take back the copyright at any time? That seems like it would defeat the purpose of copyright assignment.

The idea of assignment to FSF is not merely to guarantee to the world that the original copyright holder won't offer competing licenses or something.

Right, but my original question remains. How would the FSF allow the original copyright holder to claw back the copyright after assignment?

That seems like it would be potentially incredibly disruptive (e.g. if a contributor decides several years after a lot of work has been built on top of the contributed code to claw back the rights), especially because as far as I'm aware there isn't a separate license you give the FSF on a contribution, just the assignment. AFAICT it wouldn't even make sense to give the FSF a license because you don't own the code anymore, the FSF does.

I can't find anything on the FSF website that allows this.

It's part of the agreement you sign with them. The agreements are not public AFAIK, you'll only see them when you contact someone to assign the copyright. Yes it would be inconvenient if someone did that, but that's additional incentive for the FSF to make sure they do the right thing.

Probably a separate license is given to the FSF as a condition for assigning the copyright back. Then having a lot of work built on top of the original contribution would actually help the FSF, because then they'd have standing to enforce copyright on the derived work.

Seems to be apache licensed https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi/blob/master/LICENSE

I think atlassian sold it off

So what's the alternative. I juggle many different video conferencing tools, and most of them require me to install their app, are closed source, and/or only run in Chrome. The closest I've found is Whereby, but that has a limit of 4 people and is closed source, I think.

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