FLA

[Harri Porten]

On Thu, 6 Feb 2003, Bernhard Reiter wrote:

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

Note that we use different licences in KDE and there are even more
opinions on how to interpret them.

> The license has to be effective on a pratical legal basis
> and opinions only have a very limited legal influence.

In court, yes. But with e.g the GPL never been legally challenged (to my
knowledge) I have the attribute everything that has happened under its
influence to be based solely on opinions and interpretations conveyed and
discussed by authors, users and bystanders (slashdot readers). My very
personal theory :)
 
> > Are there maybe some people who don't *want* their code's license changed ? 
> > 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.

Sure. We intend to do the same with the trademark assignment. It's a safe
model. But as stated previously KDE needs some more organizational work to
have a functional and accepted fiduciary. And I don't mean to say that the
lack thereof is a killer argument in the copyright discussion brought up
by Mark.

> The ability to fix legal bugs is in the interest of Free Software authors.

Again depends on the interpretation of what a "bug" is.

Harri.