> U.S. copyright law makes it difficult for anyone other than the copyright holder to do that.
Or, rather, the FSF originally believed this to be true. This HN post from today[0] is an instance of someone other than the copyright holder suing for GPL compliance. They are not claiming any kind of copyright ownership over the GPL code that they're suing over. We know now in hindsight that the FSF was overly cautious about this.
An interesting tidbit is that the GCC project (under the FSF banner) recently stopped requiring copyright assignment to the FSF[1]. Mostly because they want to distance themselves from the FSF, but partially because it didn't turn out to matter after all. A developer certificate of origin (DCO) suffices for their purposes.
While true, the old approach (having a single contributor / partial owner, not necessarily an FSF-style copyright owner who owns the entire work) still doesn't require FSF copyright assignment. As an example, the Linux kernel never did copyright assignment, and the SFC has been suing over GPL violations for Linux.
Or, rather, the FSF originally believed this to be true. This HN post from today[0] is an instance of someone other than the copyright holder suing for GPL compliance. They are not claiming any kind of copyright ownership over the GPL code that they're suing over. We know now in hindsight that the FSF was overly cautious about this.
An interesting tidbit is that the GCC project (under the FSF banner) recently stopped requiring copyright assignment to the FSF[1]. Mostly because they want to distance themselves from the FSF, but partially because it didn't turn out to matter after all. A developer certificate of origin (DCO) suffices for their purposes.
[0] https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html
[1] https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-June/236182.html