> Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 2021 at 2:17 AM > From: "Giacomo Tesio" <giac...@tesio.it> > To: "David Edelsohn" <dje....@gmail.com> > Cc: "Jakub Jelinek" <ja...@redhat.com>, "gcc Mailing List" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> > Subject: Re: Update to GCC copyright assignment policy > > Hi David, > > On June 7, 2021 1:26:52 PM UTC, David Edelsohn wrote: > > > > > It's a breaking change, after all. > > > > It's not a new or different license (unlike GPLv2->GPLv3). It's not > > reverting the existing copyrights and assignments. > > For sure, but it IS a different legal framework anyway. > > Before there was only one, well known no-profit copyright holder. > > After, there will be MANY copyright holders, just like in Linux.
What we wish is that there will be no copyright holders at all. > And as you might know, many corporate Linux adopter have been sued > for copyright violation by individual copyright holders (often referred as > "copyright trolls") and settled the cases out of court for money. > > > > As Eben Moglen > > stated in the ZDNet article: "the FSF will long remain the > > preponderant copyright holder in GCC and related projects... No > > downstream user, modifier or redistributor of GCC is facing any > > changes whatsoever." > For now and for most of downstream users, Moglen is right. > > But in the long term, what happens in Linux is likely to happen in GCC too. > > Introducing such legal risk on users without writing anything in the Changelog > an without proper notice has not been much respectful. > > GCC is one of core components of today's infrastructure. > > It's used all over the world and in many different way and legal envirnment. > > > > The break mostly is psychological, not technical or legal. > > Do you mean such change was just introduced to address a psycological issue? > > I've never listen about such kind of therapy, but I know nothing about > psychology. > > > Anyway, to most people it's just a matter of risk assesment. > > GCC will now come with a new legal risk that was absemt before, thus > it should be handled properly, with a proper notice and incapaulated > in a new major version. The responsibility will now get transferred to the maintainers. And we all know how great most maintainers are with legal instruments. I can then be entitled to insult maintainers Ad Nausium about the licensing problems that occur, because I long got fed up of maintainers thinking too highly of themselves, and and other contributors telling me to shut up because I am not the major maintainer of Gcc. > And tbh, it doesn't look such an unreasonable request, after all. > > > Giacomo >
