You forgot the bit where if you work for a company you need to get approval from 18levels of management and corporate lawyers on 3 continents who have never heard of free software - and you are on the receiving end of the political flak.

Or if you work for a US company and are writing FOSS on your own time - you still risk getting fired because one of the managers or lawyers (who have never heard of FOSS) think it breaks your employment contract and it's a cheap way of reducing head count.

Has this ever really happened? This sounds more like apocryphal legends meant to scare young developers about that big, bad manager in the closet.

I personally know of two people from one company that were fired for contributing a patch to a popular open sourced IDE that the company used for development, of which the bug hampered the development for the company. It was a strongarmed political move for management to retain control over the personal actions of their employees.

This is all anecdotal anyways. I doubt it happens all the time, but these two were forced to sign an NDA on their way out. It makes me wonder how many times it does happen where no one is allowed to talk about it.

Do you know if, in this case, they worked on the patch on company time, or on their own time?

Being fired - don't know.

But if you are a minion at, say MSFT, imagine how many layers of management a sign-off would go up before somebody said - yes you can assign copyright to that little utility to Gnu.

Yes, but, after the first shot:

* Commit your bugfix / make a patch

* Send your patch to the maintainer of the project

* The maintainer has to look in a central file if you already assigned copyright to the FSF. Since you did, you don't have to do anything.

I'm confused though: Apple already have assigned copyright. Yet, they say they will stop doing it, as if it wasn't automatic, even when done once. Either they assign copyright in an unusual way, or they actively stopped it. Somebody knows which it could be?

Just because Apple has a copyright assignment on file (i.e. saying that they are able to assign copyright to the FSF) does not mean that every piece of code Apple writes--even if it's connected to GCC--is assigned to the FSF.

So Apple can write GCC patches, Apple can release GCC patches, but it does not follow that those patches are assigned. I guess that means they've actively stopped.

Sort of the relationship of Android with the Linux kernel, for me this is the same as publishing a GPLed patch to OpenSSH or something like that, this is immense disrespect towards the developer community of a project, which does have its culture.

FSF has done this as well by changing the license of their software from GPL2/LGPL2 to GPL3/LGPL3 and turning the GameSWF (released under public domain) into the GPLed Gnash.

Are you saying that forks are rude? But they're the point of both Free Software and Open Source!

If I recall correctly, the standard FSF copyright assignment form lets you choose between assigning copyright on a particular set of changes, or for all (present and) future changes.