"Aaron W. LaFramboise" wrote: [...]
projects) has. Particularly in light of what is happening with SCO and IBM,
SCO's claims are barred by the doctrine of copyright misuse (dispute with Novell on copyrights aside for a moment). That is tenth IBM's defense, IIRC. FSF's expansive claims are also barred by the doctrine of copyright misuse. And the GPL is "preempted" by First Sale anyway.
I think many companies evaluating open source libraries are interested not only in reasonable licensing terms, but an assurance of proper code ownership.
http://www.eclipse.org/legal/committerguidelines.html http://www.eclipse.org/legal/contributionquestionnaire.html
For the record, the recent FSF copyright assignment document I have a physical copy of requires all of FSF's assignees to obey the same re-licensing terms as the FSF. Perhaps earlier versions did not.
AFAIK, FSF's assignees are not required to obey anything apart from agreeing "not to assert patents which are necessarily infringed, i.e., it is not reasonably possible to avoid infringement, by the use or distribution of the Transferred Work against those who use or distribute the Transferred Work when the Transferred Work is used or distributed under the GPL or LGPL." Each FSF's assignee "reserves and retains for the benefit of itself and its subsidiaries and affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, irrevocable, fully paid up right and license to use, execute, copy, make derivative works of, display, perform, distribute, sell, license and otherwise transfer each Transferred Work and derivative works thereof and to authorize others to do any of the forgoing under any terms and conditions." Is this the part of the agreement you're talking about? It's totally irrelevant with respect to what I said earlier. regards, alexander.