The Death of D. (Was Tango vs Phobos)

[Yigal Chripun]

Lars Ivar Igesund wrote:
> 
> Tango as a project don't have copyright. It is kept by the individual
> contributors.
> 

wouldn't it be better that Tango as a project would own the copyright
for all the code?
In case that the project wants to change the license or give someone
specific permission to the code base (like Walter asks for) that would
be easier to accomplish by the Tango's maintainers. in the current state
of affairs you need to contact each contributer and get his personal
approval.
Linux has the same policy and thus if Linus wants to move from GPLv2 to
v3 he can't since he needs approval of all the thousands of contributers
to the Linux kernel, some of which are dead.
This is why all the GNU code is assigned to the FSF and without your
agreement to transfer your copyrights to the FSF they won't accept your
code. This is also standard practice in almost all OSS projects (with
Linux a notable exception as described above).

Of course, the sooner such a move is decided upon the easier it'll be to
accomplish. Linux, for example, cannot change the license without
talking to the dead or reimplementing parts of the code.