Are you saying that collaboration on Gnu Compiler Collection, binutils, bash, bison, CLISP, coreutils, etc, has been inhibited by the requirement for copyright assignment to the FSF?
There's a big difference between GNU and Linux in terms of their collaboration. With the exception of GCC, most of the utilities you named have been maintained by a very small group of people.
GCC itself has definitely been inhibited by the copyright assignment. There have been a few different ports that were not upstreamed specifically because of the CLA. AVR32 and C6000 come to mind off the top of my head.
As far as I am aware, the only times contributions were not incorporated were because the work was done by under the terms of an employment contract with the result that the employer ended up owning the copyright, then the employer decided not to sign the CLA.
Can you think of a single instance in which code written by an individual contributor not bound by an employment contract was prevented from being incorporated into a project that required copyright be assigned to a central entity?
I have read multiple accounts of open-source contributors who have successfully negotiated when being hired that copyright to any code written on their own time on the own hardware will remain with them (so as not to complicate their contributions to open-source projects).
I'm not sure what your point is. The exceeding majority of the work done on these foundational projects has been done as works for hire. The issue isn't the relationship between Google and Coder Jane. Its between Google and Red Hat. Its between Google and Samsung.
Intel and ARM both collaborate on GCC and Linux all the time while being fierce competitors. Google, Canonical, Red Hat, etc all contribute to Linux while being fierce competitors.
But the only companies that contribute to Android and ChromeOS are device partners, and the partner contributions are far more limited in scope.
Sure, but no open-source project wants contributions by contributors who do not legally own the code because in that case the actual owner of the code can petition the court to issue an injuction on the project preventing further distribution of the code till the offending code is removed from the project. (They can also sue any user of the project for damages.)
Wikipedia has to worry about the same thing, BTW: contributors who upload text whose copyright is owned by some entity who never consented to the upload, and they have policies in procedures in place to correct it when it happens.
It's not like CLA's are the only obstacle to employees contributing to the open-source projects. In fact, you might say that the main purpose of a CLA is to surface copyright-ownership problems early, when the cost of correcting them is lower.
I agree that no project wants that situation. But many projects are willing to accept the risk of it happening, and instead have reduced friction with no CLA.
Only one datapoint, but I have refrained from contributing to GNU partly[1] because of the copyright assignment requirement, while having committed to many other open-source projects I use.
1: TBH it's hard to tease apart the cultural aspects from the legal. Most GNU projects were roughly "We'll post a tarball once in a while and not have public CVS" when I first started getting involved in OSS; projects with public CVS it was a lot easier to tell if someone was already was working on something, particularly for people as shy as I was back then; I got the impression that the "proper" thing to do would be to introduce yourself on the mailing list, propose the idea, &c. and then start working on a patch.
My particular combination of low-confidence and misanthropy steered me away from such projects.
I'm sure it has. It's an additional hurdle that developers have to clear before they get their code included upstream -- it would be extremely surprising if there weren't some number of developers who gave up at that point.
(It doesn't help that the FSF's processes for copyright assignment are incredibly clunky. It was a big deal when they started accepting scanned papers in 2012, for example.)
The FSF is not Google. Their organizational goals are different enough that the repercussions of copyright assignment are different in each of those cases.
Basically I trust the FSF to stand by the spirit of open source. I don't trust that out of Google.
Sure. I don't contribute to projects that require copyright assignment to the FSF. For one thing, it's a major hassle for new contributors. For another, I don't particularly like or trust the FSF.
