The Death of D. (Was Tango vs Phobos)

[Thomas Brix Larsen]

Yigal Chripun wrote:

> 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).
> 

I'm not so sure about that. KDE and Wine atleast isn't copyrighted by their project foundations, but by their contributors, just like Linux.

> 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.