I wonder if his copyright assignment agreement also covered the assignment of trademarks. The name of the project, which seems to be the thing under dispute, w

I wonder if his copyright assignment agreement also covered the assignment of trademarks. The name of the project, which seems to be the thing under dispute, would certainly fall under that umbrella rather than copyright law. On the other hand, GNU might have a pretty strong case that including the word "GNU" in the name without being actually affiliated with them would be misleading. I have to say, cases like this really point out the flaws in copyright assignment. It just doesn't make sense from a developer's perspective. If you put in the work to create the code, why would you allow someone else to control the licensing and the name? With proprietary software, the reason is clear-- in exchange for money. But with open source or free software, you really have nothing to gain from copyright assignment, and a lot to lose. If you disagree with whatever the GPLv4 ends up being (or v5, or v6...), your only option is to fork the codebase and choose a new name. Experience has shown that renaming the project loses most of the userbase (think OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice.) This just isn't right. Developers should have a say in how their code is used-- they should be consulted when the code is going to be relicensed.