Re: SGI releases IA64 C C++ and F90 compiler under GPL

["Martin v. Loewis" <martin at loewis dot home dot cs dot tu-berlin dot de>]

>  - The requirement to do the copyright assignment is quite controversial.
>    Here the avowed anti-hoarder is himself hoarding stuff, "in the name of
>    good". Why? I've heard some legal excuses, but I have yet to hear a
>    single ethical excuse for it. And I do not think that there is one.

Just to repeat the legal excuses: The GPL could not be enforced in
court if there are hundreds of contributors; it is the authors that
would need to collectively (!) claim that their copyright was
violated. Having the GCC copyright held by the FSF, potential
violators know today that they get in trouble should their violations
become publically known.

For the ethical excuses: It may not do much good, but it does not do
much harm, either. I personally have no bad feelings towards the FSF,
even though they "own" a lot of my code - code that I wanted to be
available to everybody in the first place. On the plus side, it gives
me (as the contributor) a safe feeling that somebody (namely, the FSF
lawyers) will enforce "my" copyright (I still consider the code
"mine", even though it legally is somebody else's, and I'm just
maintaining it).

Regards,
Martin