FSFE Releases Fiduciary License Agreement 42
lisah writes "FSF Europe announced this week that it has released its Fiduciary License Agreement (FLA), which is being touted as an 'assignment of copyright.' The goal of the FLA is to allow free software projects to place their copyright under the control of a single group or trustee, though its usefulness is being debated throughout the open source community since it only address the authorship rights of a project, not the more intangible moral rights. Furthermore, the agreement seems to have been created without the involvement of a lot of lawyers and some members of the community worry that the FLA might have unintended consequences if adopted without sound legal advice."
Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
Re:who knew (Score:5, Insightful)
"Read 46 More Bytes..." (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:FTFA: (Score:3, Insightful)
As a side note, I'm seeing this as a refined attempt to wrangle the GPLv3 into play. I'm not a fan of it so I'm not thrilled with this either.
Re:always been leery of assigning... (Score:4, Insightful)
So now you are a target for a lawsuit, what are you going to do about it?
Sometimes it makes sense to turn over your copyright to another agency. Sometimes the agencies insist on it (see mysql). In the end it's your choice of course but don't think people do it because they are stupid.
Anyway this most likely applies to patches, bug fixes, etc. I certainly have no delusions of grandeur such that I will want to keep ownership of a dozen lines of code patching some hole or whatnot. Who the hell cares.
One entity to sue to shutdown a project now? (Score:3, Insightful)
How handy for people who want to use litigation to shut down a competing Open Source project... just think how much more convenient it would have been to have one small group of people with no funding to sue, so they could shut down Linux without having to take on IBM.
(If you can't tall from the above, I'm currently having problems typing at the same time I'm doing the "bad idea dance"...)
-- Terry
This is poison (Score:3, Insightful)
The end goal here is not legal "safety in numbers," as they might claim. It's control, pure and simple. You only need to look at how they behave, and how they want to bar access to software they already control to people they don't like, in order to see the truth of this. Remember Bruce Perens' veiled threats to Novell? I'm going to probably get the usual brainwashed GNU/cultists replying to this and attempting to justify that attitude in various ways, but as far as I'm concerned there is no justification. Control is control, and the ends do not justify the means. As I said then, those sorts of threats are more in line with what we expect Steve Ballmer to use.
Ulrich Drepper was dead right in calling Richard Stallman a raving megalomaniac; that's exactly what he is. The end goal of the FSF is to establish a software monoculture of their own, which they have complete control over, and which they can completely dictate use of. They also seek the marginalisation of alternatives. (The BSDs) Stallman doesn't want computer users to have anywhere to run.
The FSF's cheerleading squad on here can talk about how wonderful they are as much you want. The truth is nowhere near as attractive.