Re: FLA

On Thursday 06 February 2003 10:38, Chris Schlaeger wrote:
<snip>
> You should explain the benefits you see in doing so. In my opinion
> the KDE Project is _much_ safer with a widely distributed copyright.
> Assigning all copyrights to a single entity makes us weaker and more
> prone to an attack than stronger.
<snip>

Devil's advocate, hu?

You should read the FLA first ;-)
It's much like the trademark assignment we signed in Hamburg.

Basically, a widely distributed "copyright" doesn't make us safer, but 
indeed much less safe. If you want to continue this line of thought, 
just think about the possibility that the GPL was challenged in court 
and certain clauses were found to be void.

FSF(E) would strive to fix the GPL, of course. But we'd had a hard time 
to find all the copyright holders for a given piece of code to obtain 
their permission to change the license.

Or have a look at just how difficult it is to get everyone from the 
KMail contributors to permit adding the Qt exception to the license. 
Had all contributors assigned their rights (usage or copyright, 
depending on the authorship model) to the e.V., we'd just have to ask 
the e.V. to give fiduciary permission to go ahead and we'd be done.

But the most important part of the picture is IMO that if we get to know 
about a (L)GPL violation w.r.t. KDE code, all we can do currently is to 
hope that any of the individual contributors would resort to taking 
legal action. Not that likely, isn't it, given the (financial) risks 
and the amount of time and money involved to prepare a injunction or 
whatever it takes to respond officially to the violation.

Another thing to worry about is the death of contributors, which is also 
covered by the FLA.

Marc

-- 
You can fool some people sometimes
But you can't fool all the people all the time        -- Bob Marley

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