Re: About GPL and proprietary software

"Dann Corbit" <DCorbit(at)connx(dot)com> writes:

> Which brings up an interesting question. How has the FSF become the
> legal copyright holder to ANYTHING? After all, the FSF is not the
> original author of any of it. Who was it that decided the FSF was to
> suddenly become the owner of this stuff? What legal weight did that
> decision have?

1. RMS wrote a lot of gcc and GNU Emacs, among others, and also of
course founded the FSF.
2. For software to be considered a part of the GNU project, the
original author (and any major contributors) must assign copyright
to the FSF, which gives it legal status to defend the GPL for that
software. Many authors have done this. The FSF is very careful
about getting the legal paperwork before allowing someone to
contribute to GNU code (this is one reason development went so
slowly on some of the packages for a long time).
3. There are major projects like the Linux kernel that are GPL but not
GNU. No one entity holds copyright on Linux; though Linus probably
has the strongest claim, anyone who has contributed significant
amounts of code has standing to sue license violators (AFAIK, but
IANAL).

-Doug