"If you only contribute a small amount it might not matter"
I wouldn't be so sure.
FWIW, Victoria Hall, who litigated the first GPL case with a real decision in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobsen_v._Katzer) , told me she had to run around and get some ridiculous number of assignments (I want to say 200 but i could be misremembering), even for folks who contributed very small amounts of code.
"Now, more than 25 years later, it's less of a problem"
It depends. GPL enforcement folks will tell you it's an even larger problem now than it was before, but in the end, i don't think it's the assignment parts that cause the most pressing issues.
Outside of copyright the bigger problem for larger projects is maintaining patent peace among larger participants particularly when they compete outside of the open source project, and CLA's solve this problem (and if you do it right, make it clear to all participants they contribute on the same terms, nobody is special)
> "Now, more than 25 years later, it's less of a problem"
> It depends. GPL enforcement folks will tell you it's an even larger problem now than it was before, but in the end, i don't think it's the assignment parts that cause the most pressing issues.
Well, I would have said (well, in fact I did say) that the Linux kernel's lack of assignments would cause problems but in practice it hasn't.
The point of the blanket assignments was to avoid running around to get the scraps, as I mentioned, but again in practice if code includes chunks from Alice and Bob plus a few scraps from Carol and David, Alice and Bob can have standing to sue even if the ownership of Carol and David's one-liners is unclear in the eyes of the court. BUT if ownership is clear and it's all Fred's (i.e. FSF's! :-) then it removes a possibly expensive diversion as the infringer tries to attack standing.
Funny you should say that; there were two related reasons:
1 - the reason we didn't sell support for Linux is we couldn't provide the same level of support that we did for gcc etc. What we didn't comprehend is that most people didn't _want_ any support, or at least only minimal support, but they were used to paying for software and liked the idea of getting it on a physical medium with a paper manual.
2 - when the companies merged they were both about 200 people. RH had 20 engineers while we had over 160. Our revenue was about 15X theirs IIRC. But indeed: which company had a larger market cap? I was told when they went public they only had 6 engineers but I don't know if that was true.
" but again in practice if code includes chunks from Alice and Bob plus a few scraps from Carol and David, Alice and Bob can have standing to sue even "
Maybe.
It's a much harder thing to prove in practice :)
"then it removes a possibly expensive diversion as the infringer tries to attack standing."
Yes, 100% agreed.
It's not obvious to me what patent issues would require CLAs to avoid - if inbound=outbound licensing is insufficient, isn't the problem just that you're using the wrong license?
There is no right license for things like, say, compilers and runtime libraries, that is compatible and usable with the licenses of all the things that want to use them, and also provides the kind of patent protection and wording necessary to have this kind of happiness.
Basically, Apache2 would be the right license if it was GPLv2 compatible and had no attribution clause.
Making it GPLv2 compatible, however, requires removing exactly the set of patent clauses you want to use to protect downstream users.
Ok, GPLv2 is a problem, that's understandable. An alternative could be some sort of mandatory dual-licensing scheme but that would be a bit ugly and confusing and perhaps worse than CLAs in practice.
I wouldn't be so sure. FWIW, Victoria Hall, who litigated the first GPL case with a real decision in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobsen_v._Katzer) , told me she had to run around and get some ridiculous number of assignments (I want to say 200 but i could be misremembering), even for folks who contributed very small amounts of code.
"Now, more than 25 years later, it's less of a problem"
It depends. GPL enforcement folks will tell you it's an even larger problem now than it was before, but in the end, i don't think it's the assignment parts that cause the most pressing issues.
Outside of copyright the bigger problem for larger projects is maintaining patent peace among larger participants particularly when they compete outside of the open source project, and CLA's solve this problem (and if you do it right, make it clear to all participants they contribute on the same terms, nobody is special)