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Comment by somethingsimple | Hacker News Reader

> A private thread ensued between myself, GNU, and Benno, and what came out of that conversation was that Benno was not going to be allowed to become a maintainer of the project in GNU’s eyes.

This is the part I'm most curious about. Why didn't GNU let him become a maintainer?

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GNU requires contributors (and maintainers) to assign copyright for non-trivial contributions. Benno doesn't want to do this, thus in GNU's eyes, he can't be the maintainer.

You can argue (and it has been, to death) whether copyright assignment is right or wrong. When it comes to GNU projects, it's the rule of law. Based on mailing list posts and contribution history, it seems like the project had probably been in questionable GNU territory for awhile, given Benno's strong role and his unwillingness to assign copyright. I'm curious to see how the GNU project will respond.

Do you know what GNU's rationale is for requiring copyright assignment?

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html

Because it makes it easier for them, as owner, to deal with copyright violations.

conversely, what's the argument against assigning copyright? I'm pretty sure the EFF can be trusted to keep nano open source.

> I'm pretty sure the EFF

Do you mean FSF here?

oops. yah.

I'm no expert, but I believe the rationale is to simplify relicensing (GPLv2 -> GPLv3, for instance). I also think the papers disallow dual licensing the project with a proprietary license.

There's more discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11953703

> GNU requires contributors (and maintainers) to assign copyright for non-trivial contributions.

It's up to the individual projects whether they want to assign copyright to the FSF.

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