Copyright assignment can be ethical, and can unify a project under common ownership, or it can be misused to impose control and bypass the GPL, indemnify the code against patent infringement, and subvert the developers' intent in contributing to an 'open source' project.
Full story »
Read contents from Free Software Magazine
Anybody up to writing good directory software?
Tue, 2007-02-20 11:17 — David JonathanSince the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).
Is better education the key to finding better software?
Sat, 2007-03-03 03:25 — Edward RusselI read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.
Categories
Best karma users
From the staff of FSDaily: Comedians in Perth, Magicians in Perth, Bands in Perth
lozz
1 year 41 weeks 4 days 17 hours ago
Neither assigned nor sold
I think that copyright ownership should always reside with the original authors and cannot be either assigned or sold. I don't think corporate bodies should be permitted to own any copyright.
J.B.Nicholson-Owens
1 year 41 weeks 4 days 9 hours ago
FSF never asked for copyright assignment on "GPL code".
The article claims that the "FSF has always recommended that the ownership of GPL code be assigned to the FSF". This is not true.
To explain: the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or GPL for short) is a copyright license. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is an organization advocating for software freedom, and author of the GPL.
The h-online.com article links to http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html as a source for the aforementioned claim. If you read that link you find that the "FSF requires that each author of code incorporated in FSF projects provide a copyright assignment".
Not all works licensed under the GPL are FSF projects. Most GPL'd works are not FSF projects. They happen to use the license the FSF wrote, but they are not under the aegis of the FSF.