Re: GNU project _does_ discriminate contributors by classes

[Florian Weimer]

* Dmitry Alexandrov:

> Jason Self <jself@gnu.org> wrote:
>> This is related to the copyright assignment mentioned earlier. As an
>> example, some have employment contracts with wording to the effect
>> that "anything you ever do anywhere ever always belongs to us no
>> matter what." People with such employment contracts aren't able to
>> assign the copyright for their work because it was never theirs to
>> begin with and the employer needs to do so. The information at [0]
>> mentions this that "we ***may*** also need an employer’s
>> disclaimer..." because...
>
> ...FSF does not believe in GNU contributorsʼ honesty?

You could also say that these procedures are inplace to protect the
contributors.  Widely misunderstood terms can create quite a mess, as
can be seen here:

  <https://fsfe.org/activities/ftf/bacula-agreement.en.html>

Basically, it turns out that several Bacula contributors signed away
their rights twice (“Due to historical reasons Beneficiaries have
sometimes signed a second FLA afterhaving signed the first one with
either FSFE or Kern Sibbald.”), which is of course not legally
possible.

Collecting additional paperwork may help to prevent that situation
from arising.