Re: Seeking input from developers: glibc copyright assignment policy.

[DJ Delorie <dj@redhat.com>]

Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> writes:
> On 6/14/21 8:18 PM, DJ Delorie via Libc-alpha wrote:
>> The DCO means we will never change the version
>> of GPL we use
>
> If the DCO really means that then it could be trouble, as copyright law 
> mutates and the LGPL clause that lets you redistribute under later 
> versions is an important escape hatch to deal with future changes to 
> copyright law.
>
> But I don't understand why the DCO really means that; could you explain?

If N people collectively own copyright, then all N need to agree in
order to change the licensing terms.  The Linux kernel is stuck at GPL2
for this reason; they effectively can't get all the copyright owners to
agree to change it.

DCO means that N > 1 for glibc.  The higher N is, the harder it is to
get agreements to change.

Note that the 'or later versions' clause does NOT let anyone arbitrarily
change the license!  If $person takes a copy of glibc and distributes it
to $person2 under the terms of GPLv4, then $person2 still has the "GPLv3
or later" option; they obtain their license from the owners, not from
the intermediates, so how the intermediates choose to redistribute is -
from a license point of view - irrelevent.

So once our DCO count is high enough, glibc is stuck with "GPLv3 or
later".  Folks (including us) will always have the option of following a
later GPL, but they will also always have the option of following GPLv3.

Of course, the usual IANAL.