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I'm hoping to open source a personal project under a copyleft licence in the near future (for the sake of this question let's say it'll be the GPL). Unfortunately, I don't know anything about starting a non-profit organization for the purpose of holding the copyright for the project; as such, my tentative plan is to have the copyright notice state that I am the copyright holder. The problem with this approach is that if the project takes off and becomes a real community effort, I don't know if having the founder of the project as the sole copyright owner would work well, if at all. Is is possible to change the copyright holder from myself to a non-profit organization if this becomes necessary as time goes on?

tl;dr:

Can I go from

Copyright (C) 2012 Dylan L. Knowles (me)

to

Copyright (C) 2012 Some Non-Profit Organization

if I licence my project using the GPL?

(PS: Mods, I noticed that a lot of licence-related questions have been closed for being off-topic. I've examined the FAQ and I feel that this question is one of the "practical, answerable problems that are unique to the programming profession"; hopefully you agree and this won't be closed!)

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我不是律师，但如果我没记错的话，选择许可和分配版权在某种程度上是正交的决定。

只要代码是您的（即您拥有版权），您就应该能够将版权转让给第三方实体（即非营利组织）。这就是人们每天向 GCC 提交补丁时所做的事情：http: //gcc.gnu.org/contribute.html#legal。

附带说明一下，只要您拥有版权，您就可以根据自由许可（即 GPL）自由发布源代码，同时，即使是非自由的，也可以在这个世界的任何其他许可下发布源代码：http ://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ReleaseUnderGPLAndNF 。

于 2012-06-24T06:45:22.390 回答
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如果随着时间的推移有必要，是否可以将版权所有者从我自己更改为非营利组织？

是的，这是可能的，但是，版权所有者必须清楚。这意味着当您的项目增长并且您开始接受补丁时，请记住版权也会“打补丁”。因此，以后要更改版权所有者，所有版权所有者都需要对此表示同意。

您可能对信托许可协议 (FLA)感兴趣：

什么是 FLA？

信托许可协议 (FLA) 是一种版权转让，它允许一个实体通过合并版权（或专有使用权）来保护为项目创建的所有代码，以防止版权碎片化。

FSFE 为其使用甚至​​信托计划提供支持。而且我认为它解决了您的问题，但是您还不需要创建非营利组织，因此有关它的信息也可能对您有一般帮助。

于 2012-06-27T13:08:54.990 回答