Organisation for enforcement of GPL3 licensing

Adrian Bunk bunk at stusta.de
Wed Sep 16 17:21:28 UTC 2009


On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 05:40:25PM +0200, jyqvklioo at googlemail.com wrote:
> Thank you for having taken the time to reply.
> 
> > Are you aware of the Software Freedom Law Centre ?  
> > They do some of this.
> 
> Can authors pre-authorize them to enforce licensing terms, or can they do it 
> without prior authorisation of the authors?
> Can they themselves receive awarded compensation rather than the authors?
> If they will accept and can benefit from assignment of these rights, they may be 
> suitable.
> 
> It is de-motivating to libre software authors and potential authors that usage 
> terms are abused.  SFLC has helped in that regard.  I'm looking for a ways to 
> make GPL licensing more enforceable, even when contributors have become 
> unreachable or it is impractical to trace who wrote or improved what work.

You have to discuss this with a lawyer, not here on spi-general.

> >and any one who helped fund the action can also be liable.
> 
> What about not funding the development or providing hosting, but participating 
> and funding the enforcement of licensing terms?
>...

SPI itself does not fund anything.

It basically receives donations earmarked for member projects, and uses 
them as the member project wishes.

A main advantage of SPI is that it can accept tax-excempt donations in 
the USA, but I'm not sure whether that's interesting for you in Germany.

> The model of the 'contributor' I have is someone who
> wants to give code or documentation to the community;
> does not want their code misused or withdrawn from the community;
> is willing to allocate any financial rewards to the governing organization;
>...

Sounds like FSFs copyright assignment.

cu
Adrian

-- 

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed



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