Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering (Opensource.com)

Over at Opensource.com, Heather Meeker, a lawyer who specializes in open-source licensing, published a lengthy FAQ on the GPL enforcement efforts of netfilter developer Patrick McHardy. In it, Meeker looks at how much code McHardy has contributed, specifics of the German legal system that may make it attractive to copyright trolling (or profiteering), and steps that companies and others can take to oppose these kinds of efforts."Copyright ownership in large projects such as the Linux kernel is complicated. It's like a patchwork quilt. When developers contribute to the kernel, they don't sign any contribution agreement or assignment of copyright. The GPL covers their contributions, and the recipient of a copy of the software gets a license, under GPL, directly from all the authors. (The kernel project uses a document called a Developer Certificate of Origin, which does not grant any copyright license.) The contributors' individual rights exist side-by-side with rights in the project as a whole. So, an author like McHardy would generally own the copyright in the contributions he created, but not in the whole kernel."