updating the GPL's status in http://www.opensource.org/licenses/category ?

[Vlad Stanimir]

On 20.01.2010 21:21, Chris Travers wrote:
> 2010/1/20 Björn Terelius<bjorn.terelius at gmail.com>:
>
>    
>> Thats horrible! If the courts would uphold this (regarding software),
>> it would completely undermine the the open source licenses.
>> Someone could for example make a contribution (however insignificant)
>> to an GPLed project and then relicense the work under a more permissive
>> license.
>>      
> I am not the damage would be as great as you fear.  First of all truly
> insignificant contributions might not meet de minimis copyright
> criteria anyway, and courts might have a lot of options including
> defining works to be much smaller than the whole kernel.  I am not
> sure why someone making a minor but non-trivial change to a Linux
> iscsi driver would have a right to misappropriate, say, the XFS
> filesystem module from the same kernel.
>
> The questions of what constitutes derivation, however, are more likely
> to be GPL-unfriendly (consider that a "derivative work" in copyright
> law was intended to define how one novel might be derivative of
> another, or how one movie might be derivative of a book).
>
> Furthermore, the cultural controls which bolster open source software
> are really pretty strong.  Abusing the spirit of a license would not
> be good business.
>
>    
>> By the way, what happens after every line of code in that contribution is
>> removed? Would he still have an equal share in the work?
>>      
> I thought this was addressed in SCO v. IBM and the answer was "no" and
> that one had to show specific linkages to a SPECIFIC work, not to some
> endless inferences of derivation (just because C is derived from B and
> B is derived from A does not necessarily mean that C is derived from
> A).  I would expect the same approach to apply to authorship as well,
> but IANAL.
>
> Best Wishes,
> Chris Travers
>
>    
TheFSF gets copyright assignments from contributors why doesn't linux kernel do that too it would prevent the joint authorship thing?