1) A joint author can individually only grant non-exclusive a license. See https://copyright.universityofcalifornia.edu/ownership/joint-works.html https://copyr

1) A joint author can individually only grant non-exclusive a license. See https://copyright.universityofcalifornia.edu/ownership/joint-works.html https://copyright.universityofcalifornia.edu/ownership/joint... Traditionally, publishers usually require exclusive licensing. 2) A joint author still must share profits. See previous link and also https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2340&context=mlr https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article... (But can a joint author claim waste--loss of commercial profit--if another licenses as FOSS?) 3) Joint authors in the business of commercializing their works (as opposed to accidental joint authors) would usually have a contract between themselves controlling licensing. 4) If it doesn't sound right, that's exactly my point. Copyright law is more complex than discussed on internet forums. Just because something doesn't make sense to a non-practitioner doesn't mean it's completely senseless to a practitioner. Corporate lawyers are often much more risk averse than law professors counseling FOSS advocacy organizations. But as mentioned by the previous SSRN paper I linked[1], joint authorship is typically considered to be detrimental and even fatal to the objectives of many FOSS licenses, which usually assume a model of distinct, serial contributions creating derivative (not joint) works. [1] Chestek, Pamela S, A Theory of Joint Authorship for Free and Open Source Software Projects (July 2, 2017). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2999185 https://ssrn.com/abstract=2999185 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2999185 http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2999185