GNOME Copyright Assignment Policy

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/08/13/gnome-copyright.html

Vincent
Untz announced
and blogged
today
about
the GNOME Copyright
Assignment Policy
and
a longer
guidelines document about the GNOME policy
. I want to thank both
Vincent and Michael
Meeks
for their work with me on this policy.

As I noted in
my blog last
week, GUADEC really reminded me how great the GNOME community is
.
Therefore, it’s with great pride that I was able to assist on this
important piece of policy for the GNOME community.

There are a lot of forces in the corporate side of Free Software right
now that are aggressively trying to convince copylefted projects to
begin assigning copyright of their code (or otherwise agree to CLAs) to
corporations without any promises that the code will remain Free
Software. We must resist this pressure: copyleft, when used correctly,
is the force that keeps equality in the
community, as
I’ve written about before
.

I thank the GNOME Board of Directors for
entrusting us to write the policy, and am glad they have adopted it.