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I've had this experience myself, with RMS. I actually was asking if the FSF had the right to assert the copyleft on bison, and sign a document asserting that Bison's open licensing applied to bison - who had the right to assert the license, which was open, basically. As a consultant for IBM. We were trying to USE bison, and this was when MS would chase every possible avenue to sue people for violation of copyright, so it was a big deal ... and had RMS been willing to assert that the copyleft applied to bison, that the FSF actually wrote the software and applied the copyleft to its code, IBM told me that it was willing to _defend the GPL in court_. For a signature, RMS would have had the 800-pound gorilla defending the GPL. (We were also going to make a donation to the FSF to help them along, although that wasn't part of "the deal" - it was, like, "hey, you do good stuff, we're planning on putting this in the project budget next because if we can use your stuff, that helps us a lot." And RMS first off refused to say the copyleft was assigned to bison; it did, of course, everyone knew it, but we needed the legal affirmation or it was pointless. (I can claim that I can fly, everyone knows it, but unless I'm actually airborne at some point...) Then he asked for money (less than we'd talked about budgeting internally) ANYWAY, before we'd even brought it up, if memory serves. (It's been a long time.) Just... a giant moment of jackassery. |