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It Matters Who Owns Your Copylefted Copyrights (2021)

Throughout the history of Free and Open Source software (FOSS), copyright assignment has simultaneously been controversial and accepted as the norm in our FOSS communities. This paradox, I believe, stems entirely from some key misunderstandings that perpetuate. This issue requires urgent discussion, as two of the most important FOSS projects in history (GCC and glibc) are right now considering substantial and swift changes to long-standing copyright policies that date back to the 1980s. This event, and other recent events over the last few years in the area of GPL compliance and corporate FOSS adoption, point to long-term problems for projects. This essay works through these nuances, and will hopefully assist FOSS contributors as they make difficult decisions about copyright ownership for their projects. At the end, I provide a summary list of issues to consider when creating copyright ownership policies for FOSS.

This issue requires urgent discussion, as two of the most important FOSS projects in history ( GCC and glibc) are right now considering substantial and swift changes to long-standing copyright policies that date back to the 1980s. The usual reason is that part of the SDK given to OEMs must include an appropriate binary toolchain (sometimes with vendor-specific patches, and almost always with a complex configuration that's difficult to reverse engineer) so that the SoC integrators can compile other software for the system. Still later, I realized that individuals like Erik Andresen and Christoph Hellwig are quite rare, as most FOSS contributors — even if they've kept their own copyrights — ultimately have to take on such political and career risk to enforce copyleft that they must often chose not to because they could easily get blacklisted from major employers for doing so.

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