The developers of the GNU C Library (glibc) have made changes to the rules for accepting changes and transferring copyrights, canceling the mandatory transfer of property rights to the code to the Free Software Foundation. By analogy with the changes previously adopted in the GCC project, the signing of the CLA agreement with the Free Software Foundation in Glibc has been moved to the category of optional operations carried out at the request of the developer. The rule change, which allows patches to be accepted without transferring rights to the open source foundation, will take effect on August 2 and will affect all development branches of Glibc, with the exception of code that is shared through Gnulib with other GNU projects.
In addition to transferring property rights to the Free Software Foundation, developers are given the opportunity to confirm the right to transfer code to the Glibc project using the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) mechanism. In accordance with the DCO, author tracking is done by attaching the line "Signed-off-by: name and email of the developer" to each change. By attaching this signature to the patch, the developer confirms his authorship of the transferred code and agrees to its distribution as part of the project or as part of the code under a free license. Unlike the actions of the GCC project, the decision in Glibc is not brought down by the governing board from above, but is made after preliminary discussion with all representatives of the community.
The abolition of the mandatory signing of an agreement with the Free Software Foundation greatly simplifies the accession of new participants to the development and makes the project independent of the trends in the Free Software Foundation. If the signing of the CLA agreement by individual participants only led to wasting time on unnecessary formalities, then for corporations and employees of large companies, the transfer of rights to the SPO Fund was associated with many legal delays and approvals that were not always completed successfully.
The removal of centralized management of rights to the code also reinforces the originally accepted licensing terms, as changing a license will now require personal consent from each developer who has not transferred the rights to the Free Software Foundation. However, the Glibc code continues to be licensed under the "LGPLv2.1 or later" license, which allows upgrades to newer versions of the LGPL without further agreement. Since the rights to most of the code continue to remain in the hands of the Free Software Foundation, this organization continues to play the role of guarantor of distribution of the Glibc code only under free copyleft licenses. For example, the Free Software Foundation may block attempts to introduce a dual/commercial license or the release of closed proprietary products under a separate agreement with the authors of the code.
Among the shortcomings of the refusal of centralized management of rights to the code, the emergence of confusion in the coordination of issues related to licenses is noted. If earlier all claims about violation of licensing conditions were resolved by interaction with one organization, now the outcome of violations, including unintentional ones, becomes unpredictable and requires coordination with each individual participant. An example is the situation with the Linux kernel, where individual kernel developers unleash lawsuits, including for the purpose of obtaining personal enrichment.
Source: opennet.ru