On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 09:53:51AM -0700, Chris Lattner wrote: > w.r.t. "hoarding", I'll point out that (in the context of GCC) being > able to enforce copyright is pretty useless IMO. While you can > force someone to release their code, the GPL doesn't force them to > assign the copyright to the FSF. In practice this means that you > can force someone to release their GCC changes[...]
No, you can't. You can't force some entity to release source code they have copyright to, that's not part of the legal remedies that are available to a judge. What the judge can do is preventing the entity to distribute the code and/or money and/or jail. When source code is released, it's through a settlement. And a settlement can contain anything the parties agree on and the judge considers fair, including copyright assignments. OG.