“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.”
Am I the only one that do think this is an excellent move from the FSF ? Had this one existed previously, it would have avoided the whole problem related to the GPLv2 to GLPv3 change of a lot of code lines. This demonstrates for me the the FSF is a dynamic organization that tries to solve the problems as soon as possible. A big thanks to the FSF for fighting for my freedom with all the available instruments they have.
>Am I the only one that do think this is an excellent move from the FSF?
Yes this is definitely an excellent move.
But it’s not the FSF who releases the FLA under the GFDL and the CC by-sa it is the FSFE!
You can use this as a basis to collect the licenses for your project. Or if you don’t want to deal with all the legal topics you can make the FSFE to your legal guardian and let the FSFE take care about this topics so that you can concentrate on the fun part (Hacking). More Informations: http://www.fsfeurope.org/ftf/
Edited 2007-02-01 16:56
All I can say after reading that is “huh?” Will that really work?
>All I can say after reading that is “huh?” Will that really work?
Yes, it works. There are already two projects which have sign the FLA with the FSFE:
– The Bacula Project: http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/press-release/2006q4/000161.htm…
– The OpenSwarm Project: http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/press-release/2007q1/000165.htm…
Edited 2007-02-01 17:52
They also want you to give them copyright too, right?
That’s the catch.
>They also want you to give them copyright too, right?
You can assign the copyright to the FSFE if you want that the FSFE handles the legal issues and taking care of licence compliance.
But you can also use the FLA as basis for your own organisation or company. That’s why it is licensed under the GFDL and the CC by-sa. For example the GNOME Foundation could use the FLA to bundle the GNOME copyright in the GNOME Foundation.
For more information read: http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/press-release/2007q1/000168.htm…
Edited 2007-02-01 18:57
>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.
And well, if you don’t trust a project’s leader/s then don’t contribute your code to that project.
I suspect that the attraction of many popular GPL projects from a developer’s point of view is the fact that you don’t *need* to trust the project leader. You don’t need to like them. You don’t need to agree with them. You don’t even need to share philosophies. It enforces neutrality because no one entity / organization / individual controls the project.
Look at the linux kernel itself, and the bickering that goes back and forth among the developers, particularly Linus himself. I’d go out on a limb and bet that a considerable number of those developers would not be contributing kernel code if they had to assign copyright to Linus, and I suspect Linus wouldn’t want it anyways.
The enforcement aspect is a red herring; GPL projects (ie. the kernel) in Europe have successfully pursued infringements without requiring 3000 developers to sign the complaint. In fact, any single contributor under a GPL license could pursue infringement claims. Or perhaps more importantly, no single contributor could prevent others from pursuing claims.
This is simply about turning over copyright to ensure that the project can relicense at the project lead’s discretion without requiring absolute concensus (*cough* v3 *cough*), in fact it permits relicensing even in the face of opposition, which is timely given the debate we’re seeing over v2/v3. Besides, this is nothing new or too revolutionary, many of the GNU projects require this, Mono requires this, Sun requires it for their OSS projects, etc.
Personally, I can’t see developers being particularly drawn to a project because they’re required to assign copyright and see that as a benefit, but I can easily see them being discouraged from contributing because of it.
Certainly it’s the developer’s choice to assign copyright or not and many will do so willingly for the benefit of a project, but I think that projects should think long and hard about it before making it a requirement.