From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: ruben@mrbrklyn.com (Ruben Safir) Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2015 10:41:57 -0400 Subject: Kernel contributions from organisations and individual privacy In-Reply-To: <20150611142829.GC17984@kroah.com> References: <55791A7C.1030904@mrbrklyn.com> <20150611142829.GC17984@kroah.com> Message-ID: <55799E35.5080608@mrbrklyn.com> To: kernelnewbies@lists.kernelnewbies.org List-Id: kernelnewbies.lists.kernelnewbies.org On 06/11/2015 10:28 AM, Greg KH wrote: >> If the copyright is owned by the company then ONLY the company can push >> > it up stream and assign copyright to the Linux Foundation. > No one assigns kernel copyright to the Linux Foundation unless you have > entered into some odd business agreement with that legal entity. And > that is quite rare to do so and takes lots of lawyers and time. It doesn't take a lot of lawyers anymore than a license would. I thought that the Foundation requests this routinely in order so that it has standing in court if a lawsuit should happen. The FSF has copyright to a large bulk of the software under GNU for this reason. Obviously you have first hand knowledge of practice I don't have, but copyright is a huge problem with contrition. In order to contribute, you must have copyright ownership. You can't prove that if your anonymous. Ruben