Re: Copyright assignment requirement

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

Gregory Casamento wrote:
> When we discussed the prospect of moving to GitHub someone suggested that
> it "would invite contributions from nonassigned members of the community."
>    I'm wondering if this is a bad thing.
I think it is, if we don't change things radically.

If we had several forks with unassigned stuff, how would the main tree 
proceed?
The main tree is FSF stuff. One may debate how legal and how enforceable 
it is, but it is.
Personally I'd even like to stay in the status of "official GNU project" 
even if we are somehow a stepchild.

We couldn't incorprate back things without rewriting them somehow, a 
messy, doubtful thing.
I fear that the main tree would remain without some stuff and either 
people would be confused with various "gnustep flavours" incompatible 
with each other (I have seen that happening in other projects, e.g. 
MinGW) or at one point a flavour would become the new gnustep. But then 
it would be a mix of FSF + other mixed stuff.

> What problems would this solve?  I believe we would have a larger variety
> of people contributing to gnustep and it would ultimately remove what some
> see as a barrier to entry since some people don't want to disclaim or
> assign their copyrights.
I am seeing instead other projects I participate in, where a lot more 
patch review and discussion happens on the mailing list. I think that is 
positive instead of a myriads of forks. It can lead to discussion and 
improvements. Instead we have currently a "commit" and "maintainer fixes 
it later" (usually with complaints) procedure.
> This is especially pertinent to the move to GitHub since I have noticed
> that when the mirror was running there were a number of forks of the repos
> and a number of pull requests after it was up for a while.    Btw, I was
> not confusing git with GitHub.  GitHub is a social platform for allowing
> coders to collaborate.  This is why I think they move would be a good idea.
the patches should have been, in small pieces, put on the mailing list. 
It happened once but in a big-chunk manner.

Thus, by logical reasoning, my conclusion is that it wouldn't change 
without a license change, that is at minimum stopping being a FSF 
project (what good would be it if the forks wouldn't?), changing license 
to a full GPL/LGPL v2+ or even to a BSD style license.

I wonder however, especially the BSD option, if we couldn't even do 
that, probably, it should be done by speaking to the FSF, since it is 
not "our" code anymore!

I see a lot of possible implications which I don't like to get into.

Riccardo