The committee managing the development of the GCC compiler set (GCC Steering Committee) has approved the cessation of the practice of mandatory transfer of property rights to the Software Preservation Fund for code. Developers wishing to contribute changes to the GCC project are no longer required to sign a CLA agreement with the Software Preservation Fund. To participate in development, one only needs to confirm that the developer has the right to transfer the code and is not attempting to claim ownership of someone else's code.
Developers who do not wish to sign a CLA agreement with the Software Preservation Fund now have the option to use the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) terms, which have been applied to changes submitted to the Linux kernel since 2004. According to DCO rules, authorship tracking is done by attaching a line "Signed-off-by: developer's name and email" to each change. By attaching this signature to a patch, the developer confirms their authorship of the transferred code and agrees to its distribution as part of the project or as part of code under a free license.
Previously, developers would enter into a special agreement transferring all property rights to the code to the Software Preservation Fund, but now such an agreement is signed at the developer's discretion, allowing them to retain rights to their code. Thus, the property rights to GCC code will now be distributed between the Software Preservation Fund and developers who do not sign the agreement.
Such distribution complicates changing the distribution terms of the project, as changing the license will require obtaining personal consent from each developer who has not transferred rights to the SPO Fund. However, stopping the transfer of rights to the SPO Fund will not complicate the potential transition to future versions of the GPL license, since GCC is distributed under the "GPLv3 or later" license, allowing the license to be changed to GPLv4 without separate agreement from each developer. Among the positive effects of rejecting the mandatory transfer of rights to the code is the increased attractiveness of participation in GCC development for corporations and employees of large companies, who previously needed to additionally coordinate the signing of agreements in various instances and legal departments. For example, at one time, Apple refused to transfer its changes to GCC to the SPO Fund and shifted its focus to developing LLVM.
By concentrating property rights in one hand, the SPO Fund acted as a guarantor of maintaining the unchanged distribution policy of projects only under free licenses and performed the task of protecting the community from changing the originally planned development course of the project (for example, blocking the potential introduction of a dual/commercial license or the release of closed proprietary products under a separate agreement with the code authors). The SPO Fund could also participate in resolving legal conflicts on behalf of the developers and alone make decisions about changing licensing conditions (for example, forcing a transition to a new version of the GPL license).
Some developers criticized the actions of the GCC managing committee, which approved the decision without prior discussion in the community. By the way, there was a discussion, but it focused on the feasibility of continuing the previous interaction of GCC with the GNU project and the SPO Fund. Echoes of this discussion can be seen in the phrase mentioned in the announcement: "GCC was created as part of the GNU project, but has grown to act as an autonomous project."
Concerns arise from the fact that without centralized ownership of all code rights, confusion may occur when resolving licensing issues. Previously, all claims of licensing violations were handled through interaction with a single organization, but now the source of violations, including unintentional ones, has become unpredictable and requires alignment with each individual participant. An example is provided with the Linux kernel, where individual kernel developers initiate lawsuits, sometimes with the aim of personal gain.
Source: opennet.ru
