author(s) v. 'community' license

[graham@belegost.mit.edu]

> 
> > > But, more fundamentally, with the GPL the copyright belongs to the
> > > author and (iirc) to the people who added/modified it. for the F-CPU,
> > > it's a community, so the copyright belongs to this community.
> > How is that different from the gpl?
> 
> "single" (traceable) author vs informal organisation. We have no
> "fundation" or "Verein" or "association" yet to back the copyright up.
> 
> > When a big piece of software
> > has been developed by many people, the fact that many people 'own'
> > the copyright effectively means that no-one owns it - it is not
> > possible for anyone to get all the people who have worked on Linux
> > together to agree to change the license. The gpl is a practical
> > way of achieving what you want to achieve in this case.
> 
> not completely. i want others to be able to enforce the f-cpu licence
> even though they didn't participate as authors.
> 
For software one way this works is that you can assign your copyright
to the FSF, who have lawyers who will fight cases for you (or in
reality 'lean' on offenders and tell them how much bad publicity they
will get, which has the same effect). There's no such organization
for hardware designs. Maybe there will be one day. But this seems
like an organizational problem, not a license one. If I gpl some
software I write I can't afford a lawyer to enforce the license.
But there's nothing to stop any users of the software offering
to put up money to fight the case for me - it's not something that
needs to be mentioned in the license one way or another.
I guess generally the reason I'm arguing these things is because
the closer you can stay to the original gpl, the more likely it is
to get general backing. And also because the gpl is designed around
(US) copyright law - I don't think you can assign copyright to
all potential users and then have any say at all over what is done
with the design (eg say that developers have to release documentation)


Graham