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

[Russ Allbery <rra at stanford dot edu>]

David Edelsohn <dje@watson.ibm.com> writes:

> I believe that you are correct and Mike misunderstands the FSF
> assignment.  The original author must have some form of title to the
> original work in order to redistribute the code using a different
> license after title has been assigned.  Only the title holder may
> redistribute under arbitrary terms unless the FSF assignment document
> allows the original author to retain those rights.

So when you assign the code to the FSF, get a legal contract with the FSF
that grants you a permanent license to redistribute the code you assigned
under the additional license that you wish to use.  I believe that the
assignment contract for new work already involves this sort of permanent
license grant to the original author, so the paperwork would probably
require only minor tweaking.  I doubt there would be much resistance to
doing that tweaking if the other license were another free software
license like the BSD license and such tweaking were a requirement from the
author to submit the code in the first place.

This seems to me to be the cleanest way of handling this particular
problem.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>