Re: Why not contribute? (to GCC)

[Russ Allbery <rra at stanford dot edu>]

Manuel LÃpez-IbÃÃez <lopezibanez@gmail.com> writes:

> This seems to be the question running around the blogosphere for several
> projects. And I would like to ask all people that read this list but
> hardly say or do anything.

> What reasons keep you from contributing to GCC?

The last time that I attempted to contribute to an FSF project (Autoconf,
many years ago), I got the legal paperwork for the employer component and
attempted to find someone at Stanford who was willing to sign it, entirely
without success.  It was quickly turning into a hassle that was going to
consume considerably more time than the time I would have spent working on
the contribution.

I'm sure that I could eventually work through the process, but for the
occasional and minor contributions that I would have time to make to FSF
projects, it's just not worth the time and energy.  There are many other
projects to contribute to that don't require this additional overhead.

I find the GCC project fascinating (in a largely positive way) as an
example of a large successful free software project and have been
following the mailing list since egcs, so I'm still following the mailing
list and learning a lot about project management and approval processes
and the like, and I really appreciate people doing that in public where
others can learn from it.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>