Aloha Suhail,
Suhail Singh <suhailsingh...@gmail.com> writes:
Ihor Radchenko <yanta...@posteo.net> writes:
https://list.orgmode.org/orgmode/87ppydmigz....@gmail.com/t/#u
Thank you for that reference. I also found a reference on
lwn.net:
<https://lwn.net/Articles/543339/>.
The article made an interesting observation, and one that I
didn't know
to be true:
#+begin_quote
But anybody who has signed such agreement might want to be
aware that
the FSF thinks it owns their changes, regardless of whether
they have
been publicly posted or explicitly submitted for inclusion.
One could
argue that entirely private changes made by a signatory to
that
agreement are, despite being seen by nobody else, owned by the
FSF. Even an entirely separate function written in Emacs Lisp
—
something which is not necessarily a derived work based on
Emacs and
which thus might not be required to be distributed under the
GPL —
might be subject to a claim of ownership by the FSF, at least
until
Richard has a chance to "think about" the situation. That may
be a bit
more than some signatories thought they were agreeing to.
#+end_quote
This may be off-topic, but I figured readers of this mailing
list might
find the above interesting (assuming it is still FSF's stance on
the
topic).
From my perspective, the quote is confused about the concept of
"ownership".
IMHO, it is helpful to distinguish a right of property--a claim
that others can be excluded from the use or enjoyment of
something--and a right of person--a claim that one cannot be
excluded from the use or enjoyment of something.
Ownership is often analyzed as a bundle of rights; in these cases
full ownership means establishment of a property right.
The FSF strives to establish rights of person in software code, so
that we all can use and enjoy it however we want, with the
restriction that we cannot exclude others from the same use and
enjoyment. With the distinction between a right of property and a
right of person in mind, it is clear that FSF does not claim
ownership.
hth,
Tom
--
Thomas S. Dye
https://tsdye.online/tsdye
