Question on OSD #5

[David Woolley]

Chris Travers wrote:

> Does anything in the GPL v2 prevent anonymous contributions?  I.e.
> even if you have a requirement to say what changed, if a contributor

You would have to allocate the change to someone, otherwise you would be 
mis-representing the copyright ownership (assuming the change is 
copyrightable).  To get anonymity, you would have to assign your 
copyright in the changes to someone else.  The FSF appear to believe 
that this requires a contract with consideration, and, I believe, pay 
USD 1 to accept assignments to them.

> requests anonymity, I can't see any rational reason why that would run
> amok with the license.

I believe that "appropriate notices" doesn't allow anonymity because it 
would conflict with the known goals of enforceabilty and credibility. 
Only copyright owners (who may be assignees) can enforce, and 
credibility requires that you be able to know who owns the copyfights.
-- 
David Woolley
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