You remember wrongly. This is an excerpt from the FSF legal agreement that is used to cover current and future contributions from a person:
1.(a) Developer hereby agrees to assign and does hereby assign to FSF Developer's copyright in changes and/or enhancements to the program <name of program> (herein called the Program). These changes and/or enhancements are herein called the Works.
And:
(d) FSF agrees to grant back to Developer, and does hereby grant, non-exclusive, royalty-free and non-cancellable rights to use the Works (i.e., Developer's changes and/or enhancements, not the Program that they enhance), as Developer sees fit; this grant back does not limit FSF's rights and public rights acquired through this agreement.
(e) FSF has all the rights of a copyright owner in the assigned copyrights, subject to the license grantback to developer stated above, including the right to enforce the copyright in aid of the free software purposes of this agreement, and the right to use, license and distribute the works, or works based on the works, with the program enhanced thereby or as stand-alone modules, all as made or acquired by developer or in modified form. FSF may charge a fee of its choosing for the service of distribution.
(This excerpt might come from a bit dated version of the agreement, but I'm certain this fundamental construction hasn't changed.)
/ Martin Stjernholm, Roxen IS
Previous text:
2003-09-11 15:30: Subject: Re: IDA's policy on Pike contributions
On Thu, Sep 11, 2003 at 08:55:05AM -0400, Martin Nilsson (ja till euro, nej till cent) @ Pike (-) developers forum wrote:
There is however nothing strange or unusual going on here, because FSF has the same solution for their contributors. The real problem here is
As I remember, they don't claim copyright on contributions. I must give away my work but I still own the copyright (so I can use it everywhere as I wish, at least until it is independent from FSF software).
In case of IDA it is [seems?] different - I will lose my right to my work. A bit ridiculous, especially taking into account that Pike is distributed under GPL...
Regards, /Al
/ Brevbäraren