how much right do I have on my project, if there are patches by others?

[Ben Tilly]

On 7/6/07, Arnoud Engelfriet <arnoud at engelfriet.net> wrote:
> Joseph Hick wrote:
> > so having a copyright over the complete software or
> > sharing the copyright with other contributors should
> > not matter to FSF.
>
> Having the full copyright allows you to change the license, or
> to license it to some under a different license. It also allows
> you to sue for infringement or violation of the license.

Having a partial copyright is sufficient for filing lawsuits.
Otherwise you're right.

> Having full copyright allows the FSF to move its GNU project
> to GPL version 3, for example.

Bad example.  If you've followed the FSF recommendations for how to
apply the GPL (the ones that are written into the GPL), then no
permission is needed to go from GPL v2 to v3.

Cheers,
Ben