>developers don't have to assign copyright to the FSF for it to be an official GNU project
This is correct, but it's up to the maintainer to decide if their project will require copyright assignment from all contributors or not. I send patches to a couple of GNU projects, Guile and Guix. Guile requires copyright assignment, Guix does not.
Assigning copyright to the FSF is very much unlike assigning copyright to a for-profit company. The terms that you sign and agree to with the FSF are very reasonable and they protect the developer from having the license changed should the FSF be taken over by people that would want to abuse your contributions.
> The copyright assignment requirements in GNU projects point to the GPL not being good enough, thereby undermining it.
FSF copyright assignment for GNU projects is optional, and simply allows them to enforce the copyright on your behalf; most individuals don't have such resources available.
we require contributors to the GNU project to (...) assign the copyright to us.
Nope: "When the developers of a program make it a GNU package, they can decide either to give the copyright to the FSF so it can enforce the GPL for the package, or else to keep the copyright as well as the responsibility for enforcing the GPL."
Long answer: One of the conditions for contributing code to the GNU project is assigning copyright to the FSF. That means they're legally the sole copyright holders for all software they distribute. The official reason for this is so they can pursue GPL violations in court without involving the actual authors of the code. It also permits them to change the license on any of their software. Finally, there are various reasons they might be able to do this anyway even if they didn't have the copyright assignment rule, so long as the new restrictions didn't conflict with whatever license the original software was distributed under.
The FSF is not requiring copyright assignment. It is the choice of the GNU Emacs project that the GNU Emacs project requires them. The Emacs maintainers could change their minds about that, and FSF would be OK with that.
Long answer: Some GNU projects require copyright assignment to the FSF. The most well known example would be GNU Emacs. However, unlike GitHub or another for-profit business, the FSF is a non-profit charity dedicated to free software. Additionally, there is a clause in the CLA to ensure that contributions cannot be made nonfree. I have made some small contributions to a handful of GNU projects at this point and I have not yet had to assign copyright for any of them.
The copyright assignment situation with the FSF and the GNU project is dramatically different than the potential situation that I've described about GitHub. I hope I've made things clear.
This seems to imply copyright assignment to the FSF is _required_ for GNU projects? I wonder what RMS's take is on a unilateral change like this in one of the highest profile GNU projects?
Note that FSF copyright assignment is opt-in for GNU projects. There are many projects that do not use copyright assignment. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't.
> Sure you can sign a contributor agreement, but its not yours to give away. The employer owns the code you contributed to a FOSS project. The project got the signature from the wrong entity.
> The Free Software Foundation (holder of the glibc copyrights) requires copyright assignment for all legally significant changes by a particular author (read not a company). [...]
> if you contribute to an open source project that requires copyright assignments, then its only promise is that current versions of the code will remain with the same (open-source) license. Future versions might as well become proprietary
That depends. I don't know the current paperwork, but I assume assignments for GNU software still involve a contract promising to maintain a substantially similar free software licence.
GNU requires contributors (and maintainers) to assign copyright for non-trivial contributions. Benno doesn't want to do this, thus in GNU's eyes, he can't be the maintainer.
You can argue (and it has been, to death) whether copyright assignment is right or wrong. When it comes to GNU projects, it's the rule of law. Based on mailing list posts and contribution history, it seems like the project had probably been in questionable GNU territory for awhile, given Benno's strong role and his unwillingness to assign copyright. I'm curious to see how the GNU project will respond.
It's up to the individual projects whether they want to assign copyright to the FSF.
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