Chris Samuel wrote:
It also highlights the potential dangers around working on software projects that require copyright assignment, in that unless you trust the people you are giving control of your code to never be acquired by others you are at risk of having it relicensed without your approval (as it becomes their code, not yours).
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. Also, when you assign copyrights to the FSF (e.g. for Emacs contributions), one of the things you get back is what looks like a legal promise to "keep on being free forever". IANAL so I don't know if that holds any weight, but it seems like a reasonable response to your issue. And as Rick points out, you can always fork the last free version. The other downside of copyright assignment is that it's tedious. :-)