"Aaron W. LaFramboise" wrote: [...]
The strategy that the FSF uses is to require a formal copyright assignment for all non-trivial contributions. That puts them into a very good legal position, as they are able to license anything in any manner they like;
Wrong. While the FSF can sell all trensferred copyrights to Microsoft, the ASSIGNMENT AGREEMENT (contract) states that "The Foundation agrees that all of its distributions of the Transferred Work, or of any work "based on the Transferred Work" (that is any work that in whole or in part incorporates or is derived from all or part of the Transferred Work), shall be under a version of the Foundation's General Public License, Lesser General Public License or Library General Public License (collectively "LGPL").
apparently complete ownership also acts as a significant protection against claims of inappropriately-contributed code, and gives FSF a significant procedural advantage were there ever to be a dispute.
The downside is that going through the copyright assignment process is a real pain. While it really isn't that big of a deal, it is a significant barrier to potiential contributors. There also has to be some financial backing for this sort of thing, and I don't know if Boost Consulting, or anyone else, has the resources for this.
Aaron W. LaFramboise
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