GCC association with the FSF

[Thomas Rodgers]

On 2021-04-11 16:29, Thomas Rodgers wrote:

> On 2021-04-11 15:23, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> 
> On Apr 11, 2021, Thomas Rodgers <rodgert@appliantology.com> wrote:
> 
> On 2021-04-11 12:30, Alexandre Oliva via Gcc wrote:
> 
> AFAIK, you actually have no real say on who the company to whom you
> sold your services assigns *their* copyrights to.

>> That statement is certainly not true with me and my employer. It is
>> very much *my* decision.

> Interesting...  I made my statement above because I couldn't find
> David's assignment on file.  This told me he's covered by Red Hat's
> assignment, which supported my statement.

> Now, I can't find an assignment on file for you either.
> What gives?

1) I *should* have an assignment on file with the FSF (I certainly have 
an email trail in my archives on the matter that indicated such, 
however..). The paperwork was initiated before I started at Red Hat, my 
sense of the process was it's a disorganized shit show at the FSF for 
processing these things (or was at the time so who knows, maybe it's 
better now?, but I suspect not...for fairly obvious reasons) and I 
didn't actively pursue confirmation that everything was fully set, 
because I had RH's blanket assignment to operate under and I didn't have 
any expectation I'd need to deal with a separate assignment any time 
soon at that point for work on libstdc++.

2) So, I have done my libstdc++ work to date under RH's assignment to 
the FSF. Before that happened, however, I did work as a Red Hat employee 
to bring what was a the time, Intel's standalone C++ parallel algorithms 
implementation into a state where it could be contributed to libstdc++ 
as Intel had offered. Intel *also* offered the implementation to libc++. 
The work I did to bring the implementation in line with the requirements 
for being part of the standard library is largely the same between 
libstdc++ and libc++, and it was decided that we'd contribute the work 
to the LLVM project and relicense under those terms. Then I'd contribute 
*that* relicensed work to libstdc++. So, to this point, no work had been 
done in the libstdc++ codebase, just Intel's upstream repo.

This required Intel's lawyers to get a copyright assignment from me. 
This in turn required me to talk to Red Hat's lawyers. Where upon I 
learned, as long as Red Hat employees' work is done under an approved 
open source/free software license, Red Hat does not assert ownership 
over the work. As a result, Red Hat confirmed they had no involvement in 
relicensing the work that they had paid for.

This is not a common situation with corporate work, I grant you. But it 
is very much the case with Red Hat's employee contributions that Red Hat 
does not itself assert ownership of the work they do. This means, in 
particular, that it is the decision of the Red Hat folks who work on GCC 
to continue doing so under the current terms, or, as Jonathan has 
indicated, to not do it under those terms.

I'd add that, while uncommon, it does make a lot of sense for a company 
like Red Hat, whose default stance is to open source everything that can 
be open sourced. If Red Hat has the same rights to the work that Red Hat 
is making available to everyone else by funding that work to be done in 
the first place, there isn't much need to assert additional copyright 
ownership over the work.

Obligatory disclaimer - This was based on my experience with Red Hat 
legal, and what I was told by them during this particular process. It is 
not to be construed as any public statement of policy.