Re: Proposal to transfer copyrights to an American Foundation

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    I received garantees about my contributions which should always remain 
free 
    software, but not about the main trunck of the sofware, which was written 
by 
    the developers incorporating the Foundation.

It is not easy to write contract terms to require a license to be
free.  I tried it, a year ago, and I'm not fully confident that the
results are right, so we don't use them yet.  I still hope we can do
this job, but there is no progress right now.

     As you can see from Paragraph 5 of the 
    assignment form, the Foundation is explicitly barred from releasing 
    XXXXXXX under any form not in the spirit of the existing license, which 
    protects your contribution from being used in ways contrary to the 
    philosophy of open source and the XXXXXXX project.

That seems pretty clear.  If they made major changes in the license,
such as making the software non-free, I think you can argue that they
didn't follow the spirit of the existing license.

    1) The new foundation is incorporated in the United-States. Will the 
    transfered contributions fall under the United-States laws on software 
    patents?

Only when used or distributed in the US, I believe.  Which is the same
as now.

    2)  If some large company decides to attack the Foundation in a U.S. 
court, 
    will the foundation be able to defend itself? The foundation has 
virtually no 
    money. 

    3) In the event of a court battle, as an individual, will I be able to 
    continue selling services? What will I do then? Work for the company 
which 
    attacks the foundation? I have a wife an two kids.

You would need a lawyer to answer things like that.