Fix this: The Regents of the University of California. Allrights reserved.

Colin Percival cperciva at freebsd.org
Sun May 27 21:37:20 UTC 2007


Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> what was
> historically done with BSD software is when someone wrote a piece of
> it they would sign over copyright rights to UCB which would immediately
> license the stuff under a license that basically revoked all rights 
> that a normal copyright owner would have.
> 
> The same thing is done these days with the FreeBSD Project.

No.  The FreeBSD Project does not take copyright assignments; in fact,
since the FreeBSD Project does not legally exist, it isn't possible for
the project to take copyright assignments.

Where you see "Copyright ... The FreeBSD Project", you're looking at a
collective pseudonym, like "Nicolas Bourbaki".  Most copyright laws make
provisions for authors to publish their work under a pseudonym without
it having any effect on the copyright status of a work providing that
the real author is identifiable.

(This is not legal advice, I am not a lawyer, etc.)

Colin Percival


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