Re: Bitkeeper outrage, old and new

[Vojtech Pavlik]

On Mon, Oct 21, 2002 at 12:33:54PM -0200, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Sun, 20 Oct 2002, Rob Landley wrote:
> > On Sunday 20 October 2002 17:53, Rik van Riel wrote:
> 
> > > Germany (and France, judging from your words) have laws that
> > > guarantee that the creator of a work keeps copyright on the
> > > work.  At least, part of the copyright cannot be signed over
> > > to other people or organisations.
> 
> > 3) The creator of a work doesn't always get the copyright, at least in
> > the US.
> 
> Please see above.  It's possible the FSF copyright assignment
> just can't be legal in some countries.

Even the GNU GPL isn't legally valid in some countries. Czech Republic,
where I'm from is an example - for a license agreement like this, both
parties (the author and the user) have to be at least notified, and if
they are not, the agreement is invalid. This is a quite understandable
law, but doesn't work with the GPL unless you always contact all the
authors.

-- 
Vojtech Pavlik
SuSE Labs