Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/861566/rss

Bradley Kuhn has posted a
lengthy missive on the Software Freedom Conservancy blog about the
hazards of distributed copyright ownership.

As a result, in debates about copyright ownership, discussions of
what policy contributors want regarding the fruits of their labor
is sadly moot. Without a clear, organized mitigation strategy to
assure that FOSS contributors keep their own copyrights, a project
(such as GCC or glibc) that switches from a standing “(nearly) all
copyrights assigned to a charity” model to a plain Developer
Certificate of Origin (DCO) or naked inbound=outbound contributor
arrangement will, after a period of years, mostly likely to have
copyrights that are primarily held by the employers of the most
prolific contributors, rather than by the contributors themselves.