Re: Savannah vs. Gitlab

[David Chisnall]

On 7 Dec 2015, at 22:07, Matt Rice <ratmice@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> and if they fail to live up to this obligation they have many
> copyright assigners holding a contract the FSF would be in violation
> of,

They never sent me the $1 that the copyright assignment form required that they 
pay (you can’t have a valid contract in some locales without something of at 
least token value being exchanged in each direction).  A lawyer friend 
suggested that even if they were to pay it now (a decade late) that they’d find 
it quite difficult to enforce the copyright assignment if I contested it.

That’s probably not a bad situation for us to be in.  The copyright assignment 
is not intended for the FSF to be able to do things that the contributor didn’t 
want (and there’s a clause that would make that difficult anyway: you receive 
back an unconditional license to the code, so can release it under any other 
license that you choose as long as it carries the FSF copyright, so if all 
contributors to a project agreed then it would be entirely possible to create 
an MIT-licensed fork of an FSF project).  The goal of the copyright assignment 
is for the FSF to have legal standing to sue for copyright infringement if 
someone else violates the license, and I doubt that any FSF contributor is 
likely to contest the copyright assignment while such a case is ongoing, if 
it’s in the interest of the FSF project in question.

David

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