On 7 November 2011 15:08, Olivier Beaton olivier.beaton@gmail.com wrote:
To make it clear, copyright assignments (what I had in my original request) are common in the FOSS community, as you pointed out you talked about them yourself on your blog and wmf talked about having
Copyright assignments are inherently harmful, as their only use is so that the assigned-to body can defect on the implicit covenant of open source: that is, so it can take people's contributions private.
The FSF continues to use them, on the theory that this gives greater legal protection. While the FSF is quite unlikely to defect (it's spent twenty-five years behaving as a consistent actor), its legal theory appears unnecessary (neither the Linux kernel nor BusyBox use copyright assignments, but both have been spectacularly successful in pursuing GPL violations) and its continued use makes people think they're a good idea.
For an example of defection, see Oracle taking MySQL open-core.
Copyright assignments are harmful. They are not some sort of standard thing in open source. They would be harmful to MediaWiki.
- d.