GCC To No Longer Require Copyright Assignment To The Free Software Foundation

In addition to the GCC 9.4 release today, the GCC Steering Committee announced today that they are dropping their long-running policy of requiring copyright assignment to the Free Software Foundation for all code contributions.

GCC has long required copyright assignment to the FSF for any patches and that's bee an issue for some. Especially these days with the FSF coming under fire and even some talking of possible forks to the GNU Compiler Collection or being able to move this open-source compiler further away from the FSF, the steering committee decided to no longer require the controversial copyright assignment.

That copyright assignment (and the GPLv2 to GPLv3 change) blocked Apple from contributing to GCC a decade ago. The copyright assignment has also blocked other contributions to GCC in the past by other organizations.

GCC will continue to be developed under the GPLv3 but no longer require the FSF copyright assignment. Instead, contributors can use the Developer Certificate of Origin with a Signed-off-by tag in their Git messages.

Today's announcement ends with, "The GCC Steering Committee continues to affirm the principles of Free Software, and that will never change."