[sldev] What is the point of firstlook and giving feedback to LL

[Callum Lerwick]

On Mon, 2008-04-21 at 17:41 -0700, Brad Kittenbrink (Brad Linden) wrote:
> I'd like to chime in and add that this is not specific to commercial 
> projects either.  The FSF has a very similar policy for GNU projects: 
> http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AssignCopyright and 
> that's a big part of the historical reason for the permanence of the  
> fork of xemacs from emacs 
> (http://www.xemacs.org/About/XEmacsVsGNUemacs.html).

As the page says, the main reason the FSF does this is to allow them to
actually enforce the GPL in a court of law should the need arise,
without having to herd cats first.

This is somewhat different than the reason commercial projects usually
require CLAs, which is to make their own lawyers happy...

>   Many other open 
> source projects operate similarly.  Projects like xemacs and the kernel 
> that don't do this legal legwork are unusual I suspect, but I have no 
> numbers to back that up.

The Fedora Project requires a CLA:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal/Licenses/CLA

Fedora itself is ostensibly a non-commercial project, but Red Hat pays
the bills and like it or not it is legally culpable for anything Fedora
does.

> Projects like xemacs and the kernel 
> that don't do this legal legwork are unusual I suspect, but I have no 
> numbers to back that up.

I'd say the FSF is unusual among non-commercial OS projects, in actually
being prepared to fight a nasty legal battle. :) But of course GNU is a
pretty large and critical chunk of most Linux-based open source systems
these days.
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