[garlic100]

Why can they not defend software rights without copyright assignment? Surely they could pay the legal fees for a third party!

More and more foundations are inserting themselves into the process of "developing" software. Most of them have handsomely paid directors, who parade at conferences and talk about how awesome free software is.

The actual developers are supposed to be silent work horses and deliver everything for free. They are increasingly treated as cogs whose names are never mentioned.

[thfuran]

You can agree to pay someone's legal fees but you can't generally file legal action on their behalf without their involvement. So they could potentially defend the software rights of people who are sufficiently easy to contact and willing to be at least nominally involved in legal proceedings.

[charcircuit]

They could just send you on email: XYZ is violating your license for project X in their project Y. Do you wish to take action?

[chii]

and if there's no reply, what happens? You cannot assume the copyright holder is affirmative in this case, and file a suit.

[jen20]

If there’s no reply, there’d be no action.

[charcircuit]

Then you wouldn't pursue it.