Re: Releasing the Emacs guided tour into the public domain; also, video
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen(a)xemacs.org> writes:
David Kastrup writes:
> And of course you can choose to be less "fastidious" about this
> (as Stephen chooses to call it) and hope that nobody will ever
> use his contribution as a legal asset against the FSF.
It's not a worry. The FSF won't accept a contribution from Phil on
behalf of somebody else,
They can only work with what they know.
and Phil won't erase somebody else's copyright notice.
Copyright does not depend on copyright notices, and quite a few
contributors don't tack on any of their own. That does not make them
lose their copyright. It is not like you would not know this.
The worst that's going to happen is that RMS is going to say
"GNU
won't distribute this under a permissive license" (and possibly not
under the GPL).
No. The worst that is going to happen (to Phil, not you) is that the
FSF distributes the stuff as part of Emacs, then later some company
creates a proprietary branch of Emacs, the FSF files for statutory
damages and stop of distribution and gets its case thrown out of court
because they have dirty hands, having distributed code written by an
employee of said company.
In that case, Phil can be held liable for the damages that would
otherwise have been awarded to the FSF. And he undersigned a contract
specifying exactly that.
Copyrights are a quagmire (which is not the FSF's fault), and you do
nobody a favor by papering over it.
--
David Kastrup
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