Kuhn: It Matters Who Owns Your Copylefted Copyrights

Bradley Kuhn has posted alengthy missive on the Software Freedom Conservancy blog about thehazards of distributed copyright ownership.

As a result, in debates about copyright ownership, discussions ofwhat policy contributors want regarding the fruits of their laboris sadly moot. Without a clear, organized mitigation strategy toassure that FOSS contributors keep their own copyrights, a project(such as GCC or glibc) that switches from a standing (nearly) allcopyrights assigned to a charity" model to a plain DeveloperCertificate of Origin (DCO) or naked inbound=outbound contributorarrangement will, after a period of years, mostly likely to havecopyrights that are primarily held by the employers of the mostprolific contributors, rather than by the contributors themselves.