Basile Starynkevitch <bas...@starynkevitch.net> writes: > My point is that academics can quite easily contribute to GPL > software, but much harder obtain the necessary legal authorizations to > transfer copyright to FSF. My intuition is that if (in a different > past & a different world which did not happen) GCC was only GPLv2+ > without the FSF copyright requirement -exactly as Linux kernel is, > things would have been much different.
That is likely true, but it's something that we really don't want to change. The FSF could and should make the copyright disclaimer much simpler--for example, you can do Google's copyright disclaimer on a web page (http://code.google.com/legal/individual-cla-v1.0.html). But avoiding the copyright disclaimer entirely is what permitted, e.g., the SCO debacle to occur. Ian
