Re: Working on branches while copyright paperwork being processed?

[Steven Bosscher <s dot bosscher at student dot tudelft dot nl>]

Op wo 12-02-2003, om 05:38 schreef law@redhat.com:
> In message <20030211185700.GA6033@tornado.toronto.redhat.com>, Diego Novillo wr
> ites:
>  >[ From a discussion in gomp-discuss ]
>  >
>  >On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, Steven Bosscher wrote:
>  >
>  >> Diego, is it allowed to act in the mean time as if he does have an
>  >> assignment?  It's on a branch, maybe it's not such a big deal as for
>  >> main line especially when everybody knows all the paper work is in the
>  >> pipeline.
>  >> 
>  >I believe that to be the case, but I'm not sure.
>  >
>  >Can anybody confirm that I'm not talking nonsense?  A couple of
>  >developers for the new gomp-branch are in the process of filing
>  >their FSF copyright forms.
>  >
>  >Could they still contribute patches to the branch while the
>  >paperwork is being processed?
> I *strongly* recommend against this.  In fact, please please please
> don't do it.  Code without proper assignments should never get into
> our source base, even on a branch.

I understand why you feel about it this way.  But in this case maybe an
exception could be made, for the following reasons.

1) The "he" in my mail above is Scott Robert Ladd, who's been on this
list for a while with interesting benchmarks, and who has just mailed
the FSF about his intentions to contribute and with the request to send
him all the paperwork.  IMHO he deserves a bit more credit than some
random dude with great plans but no references.

2) The work will be performed on a branch, so there is no interference 
with any mainline work.

3) The contribution we're talking about is a library.  If somehow things
were to go stray with his copyright assignment, we would just dump it. 
I don't think that will happen though.

So the contributor is credible and the project is almost orthogonal to
the rest of GCC.

Unfortunately it still takes the FSF ages to process the paper work. 
For example, I filed my copyright assignment in May 2002, but I only got
a response last December (Fortunately by email because I had moved twice
since then).

In this case, the contributor would like to get to work now, not next
year.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that in general every contributor should
have a copyright assignment before his contributions are accepted.  I
just plea for some flexibilty in this case.

It would help if there was some way to speed up this copyright
assignment process.  For g95, we would send our copyright assignments to
the project maintainer, so he could accept our contributions and forward
the paper work.  Maybe such a solution should be considered for GCC as
well, i.e. an SC member would collect copyright assignments and forward
them to the FSF?  Or is there more to it than just putting a date, name
and signature at the bottom of those forms?

Greetz
Steven