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

[Robin Winning]

Thank you very much for your cogent responses and your "insider" insight.

//Robin

On Apr 17, 2013, at 10:18 AM, Bruce Perens <bruce at perens.com> wrote:

> 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
>