That was tongue-in-cheek, I thought Darth Vader's voice was enough of a cue.
License switches do happen though, and are the source of outrage. Cue redis.
The cause of transferring copyright is often practical (hard to track down + reach out to + gather answers from all authors-slash-contributors which hampers some critical decisions down the road); for the FSF it's ideological (GCC source code must remain under sole FSF control).
The consequence of the transfer though is not well understood by authors forfeiting their copyright: they essentially agree to work for free for whatever the codebase ends up being licensed to in the future, including possibly becoming entirely closed source.
That was tongue-in-cheek, I thought Darth Vader's voice was enough of a cue.
License switches do happen though, and are the source of outrage. Cue redis.
The cause of transferring copyright is often practical (hard to track down + reach out to + gather answers from all authors-slash-contributors which hampers some critical decisions down the road); for the FSF it's ideological (GCC source code must remain under sole FSF control).
The consequence of the transfer though is not well understood by authors forfeiting their copyright: they essentially agree to work for free for whatever the codebase ends up being licensed to in the future, including possibly becoming entirely closed source.
Think of it next time you sign a CLA!
Apologies. I am generally against CLAs, and I think it's shitty of GNU/FSF to use them, even if they promise to only do good and free things.