Re: Copyright assignment requirement

[Gregory Casamento]

Riccardo 

On Monday, June 2, 2014, Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola@libero.it> wrote:
> 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.

If we don't need to assign copyright we could cherry pick the best contributions from the forks. 

 

> We couldn't incorprate back things without rewriting them somehow, a messy, doubtful thing.

You're describing the current situation. 

 

> 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. 
>

Actually part if the issue with discussion is that's all it ends up as.  Discussion.  Nothing ever comes of it. 

 

> 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.

A patch would be so much better than a discussion. Would it not?

 

> > 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.

Why tolerate doing it this way when you have a built in system for dealing with the patches.  

> 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.

Incorrect.  A license change is not necessary.  Only the removal of the copyright assignment mandate is. The same could be achieved by forking the project entirely. 

 

> 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
>
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-- 
Gregory Casamento
Open Logic Corporation, Principal Consultant
yahoo/skype: greg_casamento, aol: gjcasa
(240)274-9630 (Cell)
http://www.gnustep.org
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