Hacker News Reader

> 1. You're not "giving up" the rights to your contribution, you are sharing the copyright with the organization. That is, your work is your work and you're still free to do whatever you want with it.

Sorry, but - as a general rule, this is false, at least in common law jurisdictions. Copyright is a transferable property right. If I assign copyright on a work to you, I don't have it any more. (That's a bit of a simplification, ignoring moral rights and glossing over more complex situations like if we're joint authors, but the gist is true).

Now, the FSF agreement (and most other CLAs) has a 'grant-back' clause: after you assign them your copyright, they grant to you a wide perpetual licence to use, copy, relicense, etc. etc. the software. So you can still do most[1] of what you could do before.

But that's a function of that clause, not something inherent in assigning copyright.

[1] Most -- but not all. There's one thing that having the copyright lets you do that a licence never can, and that's enforce it against third parties. You can't sue someone for breach of your copyright after you've signed it away, only the copyright owner can, and that ain't you any more.

>> 1. You're not "giving up" the rights to your contribution, you are sharing the copyright...

> Sorry, but - as a general rule, this is false, at least in common law jurisdictions.

It can work either way: It depends on the particular Contributor License Agreement being used, and what it says.

Some actually transfer copyright, some just grant the project entity a perpetual non-exclusive license to all rights.

> they couldn't release it under an updated license (like the > ASL2 or GPL3) or dual-license it for compatibility with > other projects without getting clearance from each and > every contributor.

IMHO, this is a huge advantage: it guarantees that the maintainer of the project can't run off and so something crazy. The linux kernel allows every author to retain copyright, and there's some security in that: since it is basically impossible to get clearance from even the most significant subset of copyright holders in the kernel, it will forever be GPLv2.

Look at it this way: if Torvalds were evil, he could require everybody to assign him copyright, and then take everybody's work and let corporations pay him to allow them to use it closed-source enviorments. Or even un-GPL the whole thing and sell it to somebody. (IANAL, obviously - not sure about that last one)

Point is, there is security in nobody having controlling ownership of a project,

If the maintainer (...) doesn't hold a copyright to all of the contributed code and documentation, they couldn't release it under an updated license

I'm not sure if it would hold in court, but it's fairly common for GPL projects to include "or later", specifically for that reason.

or dual-license it for compatibility with other projects without getting clearance from each and every contributor.

If you're releasing under a non-copyleft license, it shouldn't be needed, and if you're releasing under the GPL, that's (arguably) a feature, not a bug ;)