Neither of those licenses require copyright ownership transfer. It's what makes Linux completely bullet proof against license changes. You'd have to track down every copyright holder (everyone that contributed, even if it's just a 1 line change) to get their permission for re-licensing their contribution. Which in the case of Linux is literally tens of thousands of individuals and companies, if not more.
Most GNU projects require a copyright assignment. For example, GNU coreutils: "note that non trivial changes require copyright assignment to the FSF as detailed in the “Copyright Assignment” section of the Coreutils HACKING notes." (from: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/coreutils).
As far as I know, this is case for most GNU projects.
Linux only requires a confirmation that you wrote the patch; previous poster was mistaken about that, but they were correct about GNU.
The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the GNU General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns.
Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies that a certain numbered version of the GNU General Public License “or any later version” applies to it, you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that numbered version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of the GNU General Public License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.
Note the "or any later version" verbiage in there. If the software is licensed under "GPLv3 or any later version" - no permission is required or assignment of copyright.
In order to make sure that all of our copyrights can meet the recordkeeping and other requirements of registration, and in order to be able to enforce the GPL most effectively, FSF requires that each author of code incorporated in FSF projects provide a copyright assignment, and, where appropriate, a disclaimer of any work-for-hire ownership claims by the programmer's employer.
> The "why they require a CLA" is for enforcement.
None of that seems like a "why" to me; to cynically paraphrase it, "our policies require our polices." Why does your record-keeping require a CLA? Why is a CLA required to enforce the GPL?
A CLA is required to be able to sue someone infringing the GPL and represent yourself as the legal owner of the entirety of that code. If you have a hugely fractured ownership like Linux, it may be very expensive to bring a suit against an infringer.
That might be true for the GNU foundation. But they don't actually control/host the vast majority of software licensed under the many GPL variants. None of the GPL licenses actually cover any form of copyright transfers. Including the AGPL. That's done via separate contributor agreements typically. The GNU foundation doesn't control the licenses either. That's a job done by the free software foundation. Which doesn't host any projects as far as I know.
At this point the GNU foundation mostly just runs relatively small, older projects and that definitely does not include the linux kernel. That one has its own foundation called the Linux foundation. The Linux foundation runs many hundreds of projects and they operate mostly without contributor licenses as far as I know. And in so far they do those agreements are not about transferring ownership of the copyright but asserting ownership to ensure that the contributions people make are actually legal.
Big corporations moving code bases under their control seems to be a regular thing and that includes some pretty high profile projects recently. And of course there are many more projects on Github that use one of the GPL licenses. The vast majority of which don't have any contributor license.
So, I don't think I'm that wrong here at all that this is not that common. The previous poster seems to confuse the license with the GNU foundation which is a tiny subset of the overall GPL licensed software ecosystem.
> But they don't actually control/host the vast majority of software licensed under the many GPL variants. None of the GPL licenses actually cover any form of copyright transfers.
No one claimed this is the case. The only person conflating "GNU" with "GPL" is you.
You said projects with copyright assignments should be distrusted. Someone pointed out that GNU projects require this, which you promptly denied, and I just wanted to correct the record on that. Nothing more, nothing less.
No, the FSF specifically requires ownership transfer for GNU projects, so that they can do things like go after infringements in court, or relicense GNU projects to newer versions of the GPL unconditionally, e.g. when GPLv3 was released.
Ironically, CLAs like the one Google and Meta use for their projects on GitHub do not require ownership transfer -- only the rights to redistribute, because the prevailing Lawyer-brain belief is (roughly, to my understanding) that just assuming that right from the license itself isn't necessarily sound.
For licenses like Apache 2.0, assignment/ownership is a kind of irrelevant practical distinction because entities can just distribute proprietary versions anyway (and because it's not clear if you really agree to much more than e.g. Apache 2.0 implies), which is the prevailing worry people have. Most of the people here actually want GPL-style copyleft licenses along with some vague idea of a "communal project", even if they don't know it. Because that's the only way to achieve the practical desired outcome, where your code and contributions stay open and are difficult to "rework" in this way. The talk about CLAs and all the other stuff is irrelevant; it's a matter of the politics and composition of the project, not the exact legal words in the license.
> everyone that contributed, even if it's just a 1 line change
That depends on the jurisdiction. There is a concept called the "threshold of originality" in the US which states roughly that some obvious, trivial things just can't be copyrighted. Typofix patches that change "form" to "from" aren't meaningful enough to be given copyright, so you literally do not need to be consulted on the matter at all. It is not clear that simple bugfixes fit under this definition either for example, because they may be obvious. Realistically, I'd say there are very few contributions that are going to fit in 1 line while being original enough for copyright to apply. They could also just not include your patch too or rewrite it, in that case, so the "1 line" case is pretty much meaningless in practice.
