> makes difficult to change the license in the future Copyright assignment is certainly a flexible way of doing that. But, if all you want is to upgrade GPL, i

> makes difficult to change the license in the future Copyright assignment is certainly a flexible way of doing that. But, if all you want is to upgrade GPL, it's completely unnecessary. As most GNU projects are licensed under the "with newer" clause, everyone, including GNU, can redistribute it under a new license unilaterally, without a copyright assignment - which, I suspect, makes a good argument to stop the copyright assignment requirement. Another important argument for copyright assignment is to allow centralized GPL enforcement. If a bad faith actor appears, the project can make the strongest legal defense. In my opinion the whole system works to enable this, e.g. the FSF also requires you to get the copyright disclaimer from your employers, otherwise the strength of the legal defense will be weaker. Unfortunately, for multiple reasons, a huge enforcement action is an extremely rare occurrence (the last, and possibly the only one, was the Cisco WRT54G case), and allegedly, some projects like the Linux kernel are even against active enforcements due to conflict of interest, thus, although I support active GPL enforcement in principle, based on the historical records I cannot say copyright assignment is all that useful (although I wish it would be). Moreover, the license enforcement model by the Software Freedom Conservatory showed centralized enforcement without copyright assignment appears practical [0] - all of these, I suspect, also make a good argument to stop the copyright assignment requirement. [0] https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/enforcement-strategy.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/enforcement-st...