Re: Documenting FSF copyright assignment process

[Phillip Lord]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:

>> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/tree/doc/Copyright/
>
> That's not a web form.


Indeed not. I would ask for slightly more than a webform
though. Something which shows the current status of the copyright
assignment and which allows the maintainers to see clearly who has done
which steps. Having a list of aliases that people use would also be
nice, since you often only have git IDs or email addressed to work out
who has contributed to a particular project. I realise that this needs
to be balanced against the right to privacy for developers, of course.

It would also be nice to have something that showed the current status
of peoples copyright assignment -- currently, it is very hard to know if
a assignment has run out, or if the person has moved employer.

I think this is a significant problem as it stands; I managed to get the
copyright assignment done for the 40 developers on dash.el using email
threads and a local org file. But I have failed to update it because of
new developers coming on stream. I wouldn't even begin to think about
starting the process for a project like magit (250 developers).

There are around 1.2k developers who have contributed to MELPA (which is
a good lower bound for the number of somewhat current Emacs-lisp
developers), or 1.8k developers in AUTHORS (which is a good lower bound
for the number of Emacs-lisp developers in all history), or 1.8k who
have contributed to an MELPA package at all (which is another good lower
bound for emacs-lisp developers).

It's a big number. A better system would be worthwhile.

Phil