Free Software Foundation Europe welcomes the adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement by the KDE project. The FLA is a copyright assignment that allows Free Software projects to assign their copyright to a single organisation or person. This enables projects to ensure their legal maintainability, including important issues such as preserving the ability to re-license and certainty to have sufficient rights to enforce licences in court. Read on for more details."We see the adoption of the FLA by KDE as a positive and important milestone in the maturity of the Free Software community," says Georg Greve, president of Free Software Foundation Europe. "The FLA was designed to help projects increase the legal maintainability of their software to ensure long-term protection and reliability. KDE is among the most important Free Software initiatives and it is playing a central role in bringing freedom to the desktop. This decision of the KDE project underlines its dedication to think about how to make that freedom last."
Adriaan de Groot, Vice President of KDE e.V., the organisation behind the KDE project, said "KDE e.V. has endorsed the use of a particular FLA based directly on the FSFE's sample FLA as the preferred way to assign copyright to the association. We recognise that assignment is an option that individuals may wish to exercise; it is in no way pushed upon KDE contributors. There are also other avenues of copyright assignment available besides the FLA, but we believe this is the easiest way to get it done, with little fuss. Enthusiasm for the FLA was immediate - people were asking for printed versions of the form at Akademy before the week was out so that they could fill one in."
"The FLA is a versatile document designed to work across different countries with different perceptions of copyright and authorship," says Shane Coughlan, Freedom Task Force coordinator. "As a truly international project, KDE provides a great example of how the FLA can provide legal coherency in the mid-to-long term. It's been a pleasure to help with the adoption process and FSFE's Freedom Task Force is ready to continuing supporting KDE in the future."
KDE's adoption of the FLA is the result of cooperation between KDE e.V. and FSFE's Freedom Task Force over the last year and a half, part of the deepening collaboration between the two associate organisations.
The full press release can be found on KDE e.V.'s website.

Posted on Fri, 22 Aug 2008 04:40:12 +0000 at http://dot.kde.org/2008/08/22/fsfe-welc ... -agreement