Followup: Re: Releasing the Emacs guided tour into the public domain; also, video

[David Kastrup]

"Phil Sung" <psung at mit.edu> writes:

> On 4/14/07, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
>> I think it's preferable for Phil to maintain a canonical version under
>> "all of the above"...
>
> I agree. At least until I figure out whether (and how) GNU Emacs would
> ship a wiki-modified version, I'd be willing to maintain an
> ok-for-GNU-Emacs version.

It is not so much a matter of ok-for-GNU-Emacs as a matter of
ok-for-Phil-Sung.  You have signed a contract with the FSF that makes
you liable for all damages arising from code you contribute to the FSF
without being its principal copyright holder.

So it is not just a matter of getting contributors to agree to
tri-licensing for you, it is a matter of getting them to assign
copyright to you or the FSF.  Only in that case can you feed external
changes back to the version distributed by the FSF.  You are, of
course, free to treat external contributions according to your
personal standards as long as you don't feed them to the FSF.

And of course you can choose to be less "fastidious" about this (as
Stephen chooses to call it) and hope that nobody will ever use his
contribution as a legal asset against the FSF.

-- 
David Kastrup