Noah Lavine <noah.b.lav...@gmail.com> writes: > Since these are relatively large changes, you'll also need to do a > copyright assignment. We assign the copyright on Guile to the Free > Software Foundation because under US law, the owner of a copyrighted > work is sometimes the only person with the power to sue over > violations of copyright. The FSF wants to be able to sue if people > violate the GPL, so we assign copyright.
I'd just like to add that suing is a last resort and extremely rare, only done when companies use our software and blatantly refuse to give their users the rights that are guaranteed to _all_ users by the GPL. The policy of the FSF regarding GPL violations was explained well by Eben Moglen: <http://www.geof.net/research/2006/moglen-notes> When I went to work for Richard Stallman in 1993, he said to me at the first instruction over enforcing the GPL, "I have a rule. You must never let a request for damages interfere with a settlement for compliance." I thought about that for a moment and I decided that that instruction meant that I could begin every telephone conversation with a violator of the GPL with magic words: We don't want money. When I spoke those words, life got simpler. The next thing I said was, We don't want publicity. The third thing I said was, We want compliance. We won't settle for anything less than compliance, and that's all we want. Now I will show you how to make that ice in the wintertime. And so they gave me compliance. Which had been defined mutually as ice in the wintertime. Unfortunately, there are many corporations that will violate the GPL without remorse unless we have the _ability_ to sue them. > Please see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html for more > information, or email ass...@gnu.org to fill out a form. I should also mention that I'm _extremely_ allergic to legalese, and can literally count on one hand the number of agreements I have signed in the last decade, but the FSF legalese I was asked to sign was refreshingly fair and reasonable. Mark
