Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 1st Feb 2007 14:36 UTC, submitted by Shane Martin Coughlan
"The Fiduciary Licence Agreement is a copyright assignment that allows Free Software projects to bundle their copyright in a single organisation or person. This enables projects to ensure their legal maintainability, including important issues such as preserving the ability to relicense and certainty to have sufficient rights to enforce licences in court. The assigning party does not lose their ability to use their code either, as the FLA ensures a re-transferral of unlimited usage/single exploitation rights back to the author."
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Member since:
2006-04-28
>They also want you to give them copyright too, right?
Well, a project with 3000 copyright owners is legally unmaintainable. Even unenforceable. No matter how fair it seems that everyone is the owner of the copyright of the code he/she writes, in practice it will eventually lead to a situation where lots of valuable code must be dropped just because you can't find and contact all their owners to agree about something that needed to be done.
So every project can choose someone they trust (or a project committee or the FSF, etc...) and hand them the copyright so they manage the legal things.
And well, if you don't trust a project's leader/s then don't contribute your code to that project.