[License-discuss] Copyright Free Software Foundation, but license not GPL

[Bruce Perens]

On 4/17/2013 10:12 AM, Karl Fogel wrote:
> Bruce Perens <bruce at perens.com> writes:
>> Karl, Robin means that the work is dedicated to FSF and placed under a
>> BSD or MIT license. These are compatible with the GPL and FSF is fine
>> with it.
> Er, yes.  (Was there something I said that contradicted that?)
> projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
Just that Robin doesn't know as much about this, and it's really easy to 
confuse rather than enlighten :-)

Robin, FSF's main concern is that works meet their "Four Freedoms", 
which the permissive licenses would. They have a secondary goal of using 
reciprocal licensing as a strategy to increase the amount of good free 
software, but it is not my understanding that they would reject a work 
for being permissive.

Of course, with FSF holding the copyright they can, theoretically, 
determine the license. However, they are much less likely to do this as 
long as there is still an active developer running the project and the 
license used meets the four freedoms. Richard Stallman knows through 
long experience that pushing on developers about licensing can get them 
really annoyed, and the FSF's director is more empathic than Richard and 
thus unlikely to do that either.

A more modern way for a project to donate than to assign to FSF would be 
to become a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy. This 
organization is very clearly on the side of Free Software but leaves the 
control of the project in the developer's hands.

     Thanks

     Bruce