Re: comparison of public licenses?

On Tue, 25 Jan 2000, Karsten M. Self <kmself[_at_]ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Jan 22, 2000, Roger Cloud <rcloud[_at_]surfnetusa.com> wrote:
> >
> > Actually, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) does, as a matter of
> > policy and protocol, expect a complete assignment, to FSF, of any
> > mods to their GPL'd software. This is not in the license -- it is
> > instead a prerequisite, from FSF's perspective and accomplished via
> > the Web. This is not a big problem for most contributors of mods
> > back to FSF, because they know FSF is going to put out any "blessed"
> > mods under the GPL (or LGPL, perhaps).
>
> More specifically, for GNU projects, copyright is assigned to the FSF.
> For those who are getting confused: GNU is a project, FSF is the
> sponsoring organization, the GPL and LGPL are licenses written by the
> FSF, used in GNU projects, and available to others.

   Actually, this is only required if you want your work included in the standard distribution. You can fork the code without any assignments whatsoever. Moreover, GNU Project software does not have to have their copyrights held by the FSF, though they pretty much do. The main thing is that the writer/maintainer adhere to a certain set of guidelines.

Lynn

Lynn Winebarger
<owinebar[_at_]free-expression.org> Received on Thu Jan 27 2000 - 15:32:29 GMT