contribution agreements for open source projects

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

Alex Russell <alex at dojotoolkit.org> writes:
> John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> writes:
> > Actually, I should have spoken not of fending off lawsuits but of
> > prosecuting them or threatening to do so, which is harder if there
> > are multiple copyright holders.  The FSF wants copyright ownership
> > so it can make such threats effectively in pursuit of its special
> > goals.
> ...which it historically hasn't even done, even when there are clear
> GPL violations.

You should not confuse "no such case has ever gone to court in the US"
with "the FSF has never acted on copyright infringement".  Usually, the
people at the receiving end of an FSF nastygram quickly realise (or are
told by their lawyers) that there is no way around it.

An overview of how the FSF handles these cases:

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/compliance

The latest example:

http://www.fsf.org/news/2009-05-cisco-settlement.html
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/2009-05-settlement

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no