Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[Michal Nazarewicz]

On Wed, Feb 19 2014, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
> With regard to copyright assignments, you pretend that it is some magic
> ritual of initiation.  There is nobody who'd be more glad than the FSF
> if this kind of paperwork was without merit and unneeded.

There are people who would argue that this kind of paperwork is in fact
unneeded.  I admit it has merit, and I understand why lawyers want it,
but it's not at all clear that it is worth creating this burden.

SFC for example runs its GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers
representing just a small fraction of Linux copyright holders.  Even GNU
does not require copyright assignment to all its projects.

I may be wrong in my assessment, I'm not a lawyer after all, but I bet
*majority* of developers, myself included, see CA as an unneeded burden.
We can only guess how many people dropped their patches after reading CA
is required.

And individuals are not even the hardest part.  I became a maintainer of
auto-dim-other-buffers.el[1].  I would love to have it in GNU ELPA, but
frankly, I won't even bother asking other contributors of to the project
to sign a CA, and it's not even a complicated case -- there are only two
other people involved -- again we can only guess how many projects are
not contributed to Emacs because they were started outside of GNU Emacs
and now people don't want to deal with CAs.

And we did not even start with the fact that some people oppose CAs as
a matter of principle.

[1] https://github.com/mina86/auto-dim-other-buffers.el

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