[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] GPL defense issues

[Jeremy Allison]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 06:45:40PM +0200, Greg KH wrote:
> 
> That brings up a question, who exactly is the SFC representing here?
> What developers have signed over copyrights to the SFC?  Was this done
> in a "permanent" way?  "revoking" copyright assignment isn't exactly a
> simple thing to do, last I checked, so is this really true?

Ah, this could be a big part of the misapprehensions in this
thread !

While it is possible to sign over copyrights to the SFC, this
is not commonly done by member projects (I think I'm safe in
saying that). It's also not required to assign copyright in
order for SFC to represent copyright holders in enforcement
actions.

In Samba for example (which I can talk publicly about),
*NO* devlopers have assigned any copyrights to the SFC,
they are merely acting as an enforcement agent authorized
to do so on our behalf - by the wishes of the developers.

The Samba developers can revoke such permission at any time and
for any reason. The reason we haven't is that the consensus
for Samba is that SFC is doing a good job representing our
interests.