FLA

[Bernhard Reiter]

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On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 02:31:15PM +0100, Harri Porten wrote:
> On Thu, 6 Feb 2003, Marc Mutz wrote:

> > Basically, a widely distributed "copyright" doesn't make us safer, but=
=20
> > indeed much less safe.=20

> I think it makes it "safer" in the respect that many people's opinions are
> respected which is good for the project's stability.

I would note that the main point of licenses is not opinions.
They try to legally enforce the decision of the rights holder.
In this case to release work as Free Software.
The license has to be effective on a pratical legal basis
and opinions only have a very limited legal influence.

> Are there maybe some people who don't *want* their code's license changed=
 ?=20
> Those won't assign their copyright to anyone else in the first place.

The idea of the FLA is that the fiduciary (e.g. the FSFE or the KDE e.V.)
acts on behalf of the people. The FLA makes sure that this (e.g.
fully release as Free Software) is done or the rights will fall back.
The ability to fix legal bugs is in the interest of Free Software authors.

> > But the most important part of the picture is IMO that if we get to kno=
w=20
> > about a (L)GPL violation w.r.t. KDE code, all we can do currently is to=
=20
> > hope that any of the individual contributors would resort to taking=20
> > legal action. Not that likely, isn't it, given the (financial) risks=20
> > and the amount of time and money involved to prepare a injunction or=20
> > whatever it takes to respond officially to the violation.

If copyright is splitted up too much,=20
one person holding just a fraction of rights might not be able
to really act in court, because he might not be able=20
to represent a big enough fraction of rights on the work in question.

Another note: I believe that the FLA will work
in both copyright traditions, anglo-saxon and continental european.
So you can use it all over the world.

	Bernhard

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