Re: Savannah vs. Gitlab

[Matt Rice]

On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 1:16 PM, Maxthon Chan <xcvista@me.com> wrote:

> Even scarier, what if someone controlling FSF after RMS suddenly decided to 
> relicense all code they own to something proprietary and ask all contributors 
> to surrender their FSF-owned code, sending out DMCA notices in the process 
> which will legally stand given the license transfers before? Although this is 
> movie plot straight out of Tron series but given the similarity of Flynn and 
> RMS+Woz and the greediness of the rest of the world in general this is not 
> that far fetched, and it have happened at least once already (when Oracle 
> bought Sun and reversed a few of Sun’s GPL licensing decisions, the very 
> licensing scare that created MariaDB and LibreOffice projects)
>
> Dangerous territory ahead, folks.

I don't have a copy of the copyright assignment form on hand, so don't
take my word for it but my recollection is that it holds the FSF to
task,

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gnulib.git;a=blob;f=doc/Copyright/conditions.text;h=8ef01fbefad54184bc49f0c4fedc813123445e52;hb=HEAD

  37 The assignment contract commits the foundation to setting distribution
  38 terms that permit free redistribution.

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,

I've never seen Sun's copyright assignment, but I would guess that
they not only left this part out, but added something to the opposite
effect.