Re: Copyright assignment requirement

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 2 Jun 2014, at 23:47, "Lundberg, Johannes" <johannes@brilliantservice.co.jp> 
wrote:

> I believe a switch to BSD license could possibly be healthy for this project. 
> As many companies who want to use this project but can not due to GPL/LGPL. 
> Surely all improvements would not be committed upstream but maybe more than 
> is currently. 

I don't agree with this for the simple reason that I have seen no evidence of 
many companies being unable to use GNUstep due to licensing.
On the contrary, I work for companies that sell to major international telecoms 
operators ... big, conservative companies ... who don't have a problem with the 
license.

What I have come across personally though, is a small number of companies who 
were initially against including/using free software, but changed their 
position when the actual license was shown to them (ie they had an initial 
uneducated reaction influenced by FUD).

While there will undoubtedly be a few people who might want to use the software 
in a way that's incompatible with the license, there can't be many since the 
LGPL is actually very permissive (and it's hard to make other software *depend* 
on the the few GPL tools in a way that would bring it under the GPL).

My impression is that the people who say the license is a problem are mostly 
those who are already advocates of BSD and/or negative about the FSF, and while 
I don't doubt that their beliefs are honestly held, I question the degree to 
which such a person would have argued in favour of using GNU software in a 
company.

So my feeling is that the number of companies for which the license is an issue 
is few rather than many, and that they are probably over-reported too.


On the issue of copyright my feeling is similar but different;
I know people hate the admin process of doing the copyright assignment (much 
more than people disliking the principle, though there are a few of those too), 
but we need the copyright to be assigned to the FSF (or some similar 
arrangement to ensure that all code in the project is legitimately released 
under the LGPL license we are using) because otherwise the companies I deal 
with really might have a problem using GNUstep.

If GNUstep contained components for which there was uncertainty about whether 
the code was actually under the LGPL license then these companies would not 
dare to use it; they need confidence in the legitimacy of the code.

I don't think copyright assignment to the FSF is the only way to get that, but 
if we abandoned that we'd need to put something else in its place, and the 
admin overhead of the replacement is likely to be just as onerous (or worse 
than) the existing process.

About the small number of people with philosophical objections; do they 
outnumber those with philosophical objections to *not* assigning copyright?  I 
don't know what the ratio of dedicated-free-software-developers to 
anti-free-software-developers is.