Retaining copyright means that you can't fork their code to easily establish a working but slightly incompatible version, which is what fragmentation is. Proje

Retaining copyright means that you can't fork their code to easily establish a working but slightly incompatible version, which is what fragmentation is. Project leader is not a formalized position (or even a meaningful concept, really) in free software and doesn't come with the power to prevent forks or fragmentation. I guess their thinking is once a community of users and developers is brought together, they can be trusted to establish a model that retains compatibility since it is in everybody's interest. While at the moment, an incompatible fork would have the same "network effect" as the original. Either way, the copyright only covers the software, not the protocol.