Re: iconvme sync

[Paul Eggert]

Simon Josefsson <address@hidden> writes:

> But I have never understood why one has to sign per-projects form for
> the FSF anyway...

It's a legal thing.  When you assign your copyright, you have to
specify what it is you're signing over.  Otherwise there could be
abuses of the legal system (you can probably think of some scenarios;
suffice it to say that there were real abuses before this requirement
was imposed many, many years ago).

If you assign your copyright on (say) your changes to coreutils, then
the FSF owns the copyright to those changes, and can move the
resulting coreutils code into gnulib and then into other projects.

Legally speaking, the important thing is the first assignment, which
specifies the code that you're donating.  So long as gnulib continues
to use only GNU code imported from other projects that are already
covered by copyright assignments, we don't need to sign papers for
gnulib specially, nor do we need to sign papers when the gnulib code
is exported into other GNU projects (or even non-GNU projects, so long
as they respect the copright license).

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer and this is not really legal advice.
I'm just trying to explain things to Simon so that he can go back
to doing technical work....