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

The point may be moot ...

[david.dasz.at]

... if the assignment is to a community instead of a company. No? e.g. if the assignment is conditional on a free-only relicensing policy, it would defuse your argument.

[simont]

Does that even make sense? I mean, copyright is precisely the right to be the final arbiter of what licensing may or may not be done on the copyrighted work. To assign somebody copyright, conditional on them only licensing it in certain ways, sounds a lot to me like "not actually assigning copyright after all, just granting a licence to redistribute under certain conditions".

Not really

[(Anonymous)]

It would for instance give them the right to enforce (at law) violations of the copyright on the code assigned. Right?

It would give them the right to put the code under a different Free license as per the agreement without having to get your further permission. Right? Say you had dropped out of sight for some reason and could not be contacted.

all the best,

drew