> If there are multiple authors of a copyrighted work, successful enforcement depends on having the cooperation of all authors.
> In order to make sure that all of our copyrights can meet the recordkeeping and other requirements of registration, and in order to be able to enforce the GPL most effectively, FSF requires that each author of code incorporated in FSF projects provide a copyright assignment
FSF is not the average recipient of copyright assignments - I'd be much more comfortable giving copyright assignment to FSF than to pretty much any other entity:
* They're much less likely to rugpull on the contributors and change the licence to something non-free: even pessimistically assuming their leadership got subverted somehow, doing something like this would pretty much be the deathknell to FSF. So there's a known, very high cost to the negative side of CLAs.
* They're much more likely than the average project or corporation to actually use the positive benefits of copyright assignment, to pursue legal action and enforce the Free licences the way it empowers them to.
> In order to make sure that all of our copyrights can meet the recordkeeping and other requirements of registration, and in order to be able to enforce the GPL most effectively, FSF requires that each author of code incorporated in FSF projects provide a copyright assignment
FSF is not the average recipient of copyright assignments - I'd be much more comfortable giving copyright assignment to FSF than to pretty much any other entity:
* They're much less likely to rugpull on the contributors and change the licence to something non-free: even pessimistically assuming their leadership got subverted somehow, doing something like this would pretty much be the deathknell to FSF. So there's a known, very high cost to the negative side of CLAs.
* They're much more likely than the average project or corporation to actually use the positive benefits of copyright assignment, to pursue legal action and enforce the Free licences the way it empowers them to.