Matthew Garrett ([personal profile] mjg59) wrote,
@ 2011-05-17 01:14 pm UTC
Entry tags:advogato, fedora
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?

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[personal profile] mjg59
2011-05-18 06:05 pm UTC (link)
I think so? The FSF commit to not doing anything that'd give them a competitive advantage over you - if they change the license then you get the code under the new license as well. There's still some cost to you submitting, but it's not as potentially large.

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[personal profile] reddragdiva
2011-05-18 06:10 pm UTC (link)
Yes, that's what I thought. In game theory terms, you can be pretty sure the FSF is not going to defect; whereas the whole purpose of assigning copyright to a commercial entity who do a proprietary version is so they can defect.

(It was particularly egregious in the case of OOo, given it was LGPL/SISSL and they didn't need to hold copyright to release a proprietary fork anyway.)

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