Copyright assignment

[mjg59]

The fundamental problem with projects requiring copyright assignment is that there's an economic cost involved in me letting a competitor sell a closed version of my code without letting me sell a closed version of their code. If this cost is perceived as larger than the cost of maintaining my code outside the upstream tree, it's cheaper for me to fork than it is to sign over my rights. So if I have my own engineering resources, what rational benefit is there to me assigning my copyright?

Comments

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[(Anonymous)]

distributed version control should make it very cheap to maintain a fork.

it would be great if there were a good hosting site (like sourceforge) specifically designed for keeping forks. maybe with support for auto pulling upstream, adding the patches, and making packages.

then anyone could make their own 'go-oo' type project.

at some point the company who wanted the copyright assignment would be so tempted by all the lovely patches in the fork, that they would have to drop the requirement.