Any idea what important GNU projects like GCC and glibc are doing about RMS's return to the FSF board? Are the people doing the real work and being dragged down by this shit org willing to cut ties and operate independently?
Conversation
A proposal, extending to those folks and others: declare a day of termination of FSF copyright assignments. Everyone who signs on pledges, on that day, to notify FSF their assignment is no longer in effect, and optionally...
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..to use the sublicensing allowance in the standard FSF assignment to allow all past code they've assigned to be used under another license of their choice.
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The day could be unconditional, just for everyone to send their notices in unison, or could be conditional, to be called off if RMS and all board members who voted to welcome him back *all* resign.
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Also, note that the FSF copyright assignment policy actually gives forks an *advantage* over the FSF if contributors act in unison: by terminating assignment and continuing their fork, they produce code the FSF cannot merge back and use without changing their assignment policy.
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This makes it possible for coordinated action by the actual people working on any GNU project to effectively oust the FSF and prevent the FSF from continuing their fork.
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Replying to
I would never contribute to any project where I had to do copyright assignment. I expect to get the same terms for their code as they receive for mine, and it remains my code. I wouldn't do open source work for a company where they owned the code let alone doing it for free...
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They have a ton of power beyond copyright assignment via tons of projects trusting them to define future versions of the GPL.
Their decision to make it harder for developers to seek damages for license violations as part of GPLv3 is an example.
Not a fan of that kind of trust.
Developers are trusting them to indefinitely remain in alignment with their own goals. I don't really see how that could possibly work out over the long-term.
Inevitable that there will be divergences in opinions but they've centralized power in an unaccountable organization.