You can't waive copyright, but the license you put on your work takes care of reuse and liability.Konata wrote:... Are contributors not required to hand over copyright of their contributions to the ReactOS Foundation? That's really bad. I hope that's not the case.Swyter wrote:ask every past developer for permission
Well, you can't change the copyright of external code like Wine, but you could still change the kernel's license.
So, to make it short and sweet; every author would have to agree, or, their individual work would have to be rewritten from scratch.
Apart from that, I think that MIT/BSD are okay for small-ish helper projects where you don't want to complicate yourself (while covering your legal ass), and GPL works great for big projects that take a lot of time, that way you can force them to contribute back their time/code if they make use of your work, automatically reaping back any enhancements.
GPLv3 is even more viral in the sense that it also forces them to grant you access to every piece needed for it to work as they released it in binary form (Tivoization).
TLDR: Freedom!