Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/02/01/copyright-not-all-equal.html

In
an interview
with IT Wire, Mark Shuttleworth argues that all
copyright assignment systems are equal, saying further that what Intel,
Canonical and other for-profit companies ask for in the process are the
same things asked for by Free Software non-profit organizations like the
Free Software Foundation.

I’ve written
about this before, and
recently quit
using Ubuntu in part because of Canonical’s assignment policies
(which are, as Mark correctly points out, not that different from
other for-profit company’s assignment forms.)

However, it’s quite disingenuous for companies to point to the long
standing tradition of copyright assignment to the FSF as a justification
for their own practices. There are two key differences that people like
Shuttleworth constantly gloss over or outright ignore:

• FSF promises to never make their software
  proprietary. Shuttleworth claims that All copyright
  assignment agreements empower dual licensing, and relicensing, but
  that is simply a false statement if you include FSF in the
  “All”. FSF promises to never proprietarize its versions of
  the software assigned to it and always release its versions of the
  software under Free Software licenses.
• Non-profits have a different duty to the public.
  For-profit companies have one duty: to make money for their owners
  and/or shareholders. Non-profit organizations, by contrast, are
  chartered to carry out the public good. Therefore, they cannot
  liberally ignore what’s in the public good just because it makes some
  money. An organization like FSF, which has a public charter that
  explicitly says that it seeks to advance software freedom, would fail to
  carry out its public mission if it engaged in proprietary
  relicensing.

It seems that Mark Shuttleworth wants to confuse us about copyright
assignment so we just start signing away our software. In essence,
companies try to bank on the goodwill created by the FSF copyright
assignment process over the years to convince developers to give up their
rights under GPL and hand over their hard work for virtually nothing in
return. We shouldn’t give in.

I am not opposed to copyright assignment in the least, in fact, I
support it in many cases. However, without assurances that otherwise
copylefted software won’t be relicensed as proprietary software,
developers should treat a copyright assignment process with maximum
skepticism. Furthermore, we should simply not tolerate attempts by
for-profit companies to confuse the developer community by comparing as
equals copyright assignment systems that are radically different in
their intent, execution, and consequences.

(Some useful additional
reading: my
“Open Core” Is the New Shareware,
Michael
Meeks’ Thoughts on Copyright Assignment, Dave
Neary’s Copyright assignment and other barriers to
entry,
and this LWN article.)