* Cem F. Karan: > In my personal view, I think that Debian should lean towards licenses, > and discourage assignments where possible; that ensures that if > someone is a bad actor, then there will still be a chance to fork the > code and continue open development as all the good actors will still > have the necessary ownership over the parts that they contributed.
I think what you call “assignments” is about contributions to upstream. This does not directly affect what Debian ships (unless a software license stipulates that any change is automatically licensed (assigned?) to the original developer). It is a personal decision of each Debian/upstream contributor. I assume that this is the reason why it rarely comes up on debian-legal. In practice, I see zero benefit from assignment. One of the largest holders of assignments uses different licenses for programs and documentation, so you cannot generate API documentation from doctext strings, and they do not respond at all to relicensing requests when there's an obvious mistake and the wrong license is used for a source file. That's two cases where assignments should greately simplify matters, but that's not what happens in my experience.
