Hey, sorry for being so inactive in the last days (weeks?), I'm just having some free time after my final exams here.
Yeah, I would assign the copyright to the FSF, I already read this but thought I'll cope with that later^^ - Daniel On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 12:37 AM, Mark H Weaver <m...@netris.org> wrote: > 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
