Copyright forms (was: Automated testing framework)

[Gerald Pfeifer <pfeifer at dbai dot tuwien dot ac dot at>]

On Thu, 16 Nov 2000, Richard Stallman wrote:
>> [gcc/MAINTAINERS]
> The 89 people listed there probably do various different kinds of
> work.  Some of them look at changes written by other contributors and
> install them; those people need to check for papers, and normally
> ought to know what to say to the other contributors to tell them how
> to sign papers.  I hope the number of these people is much smaller
> than 89, though.

It is 46.

These are volunteers who maintain front-ends, ports, i18n, documentation,
web pages... who may install changes of their own and approve changes of
others in those areas they maintain.

Not all of them install/approve other people's changes regularily, and
often these other contributors are well-known, such as maintainers of
other parts of the compiler.

>> Does assign.future also cover changes to the GCC manual?
> I asked our lawyer about this a month ago, and that is when I wrote
> the text in maintain.texi about the subject.  In the case of the GCC
> manual, since it is published separately as a book, we should get
> separate papers for the manual.

Ouch. Does that mean that before the next edition of the book someone
(FSF staff?) will have to contact all who have contributed to the manual?

If so, this will be hardly possible, as -- according to the GNU Coding
Standards -- ChangeLogs for documentation are not required and we, based
on a suggestion by myself, switched to requiring such ChangeLogs only two
years ago.

Have you considered the possibility to provide a "unified"  copyright
assignment that applies to both GCC and the book that we could use in
the future?

Gerald