Side note: for somebody with a "gnu.org" address, you're showing
some really bad taste. Do you know that the FSF ends up asking for
a hell of a lot of paperwork and other crazy things to take peoples
submissions. And they actually want the copyrights signed over, so
that they can change it to _any_ license.
The DCO, in contrast, is a paragon of simplicity and clarity, and
doesn't ask you to sign away any rights.
You are misinformed. The copyright assignments from the FSF explictly
state that the code will always be free software, and they grant back
all rights to the code you assigned to them.
On Wed, 17 Jun 2009, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
The DCO, in contrast, is a paragon of simplicity and clarity, and
doesn't ask you to sign away any rights.
You are misinformed. The copyright assignments from the FSF explictly
state that the code will always be free software, and they grant back
all rights to the code you assigned to them.
Blah. They define the term "free software" too, so that doesn't make any
difference. They can relicense it any crazy way they want, as shown by the
whole annoying GPLv3 idiocy. It doesn't matter one whit whether you agree
with them or not.
And isn't it "nice" of them to not require exclusive ownership? Gag. And
what a bunch of hypocritical people they are too - because they'll happily
take code from other people without any copyright assignment what-so-ever
when they feel like it (case in point: Hurd took drivers and filesystems
from Linux, and I can pretty much guarantee that they didn't have
copyright assignments for any of it - but hey, rules are rules only when
they apply to _other_ people, right?)
And you didn't face the actual issue: the papers the FSF makes you sign
are _way_ less obvious than the DCO is.
Linus