
Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck@gmail.com):
The counterargument is that if you don't do copyright assignment, and five years into a project you suddenly discover that an OpenSSL exception is a really good idea, you are completely fucked, because maybe one in twenty of your contributors have dropped off the grid in the meantime.
This is based on a misconception, almost universally held among the open source community, that signoff is required for any licensing change(to a collective work for which you're project lead), even one that causes no legally provable harm to the contributors, and that failure to get that signoff creates copyright infringement _even_ in those cases. http://www.catb.org/esr/Licensing-HOWTO.html#id2852366 Adding an OpenSSL exception, e.g., the one Phil Hazel added circa 2001 to the Exim MTA's GPL licensing, strikes me as the very model of such tort-free change. (I don't believe Phil requires copyright assignment.)