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That might be true for the GNU foundation. But they don't actually control/host the vast majority of software licensed under the many GPL variants. None of the GPL licenses actually cover any form of copyright transfers. Including the AGPL. That's done via separate contributor agreements typically. The GNU foundation doesn't control the licenses either. That's a job done by the free software foundation. Which doesn't host any projects as far as I know.

At this point the GNU foundation mostly just runs relatively small, older projects and that definitely does not include the linux kernel. That one has its own foundation called the Linux foundation. The Linux foundation runs many hundreds of projects and they operate mostly without contributor licenses as far as I know. And in so far they do those agreements are not about transferring ownership of the copyright but asserting ownership to ensure that the contributions people make are actually legal.

Big corporations moving code bases under their control seems to be a regular thing and that includes some pretty high profile projects recently. And of course there are many more projects on Github that use one of the GPL licenses. The vast majority of which don't have any contributor license.

So, I don't think I'm that wrong here at all that this is not that common. The previous poster seems to confuse the license with the GNU foundation which is a tiny subset of the overall GPL licensed software ecosystem.




> But they don't actually control/host the vast majority of software licensed under the many GPL variants. None of the GPL licenses actually cover any form of copyright transfers.

No one claimed this is the case. The only person conflating "GNU" with "GPL" is you.

You said projects with copyright assignments should be distrusted. Someone pointed out that GNU projects require this, which you promptly denied, and I just wanted to correct the record on that. Nothing more, nothing less.


There is a Gnu Foundation, but it has nothing to do with computing: http://www.gnufoundation.org/who-we-are

You mean the GNU Project.


I don't think either of the comments you replied to has stated the opposite. They both spoke of GNU, not the overall GPL licensed software ecosystem.




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