Liability protection project - call for participants

MJ Ray mjr at phonecoop.coop
Tue May 15 09:50:02 UTC 2007


Toni Mueller <toni at debian.org> wrote:
> [...] Eg. IFF they (hypthetically) were to
> successfully sue the FSF, then we'd lose a large chunk of important
> stuff because the copyrights held by the FSF will probably be
> confiscated in order to "pay" the damages. [...]

Even if that is the case (what is the precedent?), then we would not
lose much because as far as I know, FSF grants a perpetual
all-permissions license back to the original author of the copyright-
assigned work.  We'd only lose the ability to defend copyright
infringment on the stuff, but if the FSF has been successfully sued,
then we've arguably lost a big chunk of that anyway.  Other than maybe
making some GPL code effectively BSD-like for whoever sued FSF, the
winner would gain nothing except the ability to police some of our
code for us.

FSF has its faults, but this aspect looks pretty clever to me.

Hope that explains,
-- 
MJ Ray - see/vidu http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Experienced webmaster-developers for hire http://www.ttllp.co.uk/
Also: statistician, sysadmin, online shop builder, workers co-op.
Writing on koha, debian, sat TV, Kewstoke http://mjr.towers.org.uk/


More information about the Spi-general mailing list