Thomas Bushnell, BSG <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > Lots of free software projects are developed by fairly large groups. It > > seems to be a common practice for everyone who contributes to a project to > > be added to the Copyright notice at the top of the file. Is this actually > > wise? IIRC, should it become necessary, legal action cannot be taken by > > just one or two of the Copyright holders - it has to be everybody. > > It's unwise, though in general you don't need everyone to agree to > bring an action; each person has independent rights over the part of > it that's theirs. But it is very likely to greatly complicate such > things. > > An excellent solution is to assign the rights to the FSF or another > similar organization.
On the other hand, having a large number of copyright holders of a GPL project can be an advantage: it means the project cannot easily be bought out or have its licence changed or abused, as you would need the consent of every copyright holder. There was a relevant example recently. I forget the details, but somebody put a binary-only device driver into the kernel. Linus said it was all right, but other kernel authors objected strongly, and I think their objections had a good effect in that case. In practice, most people working on free software projects can't be bothered with assigning copyrights, so everyone who contributes is a copyright holder, whether their name is mentioned or not. After a while it become difficult to trace all the authors, which means you couldn't assign the rights to the FSF even if you wanted to. So we'd better hope there isn't a legal problem with "group copyright" (and I don't think there is). Edmund
