Re: Why not contribute? (to GCC)

[Michael Witten <mfwitten at gmail dot com>]

On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 21:12, Manuel LÃpez-IbÃÃez
<lopezibanez@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 26 April 2010 02:12, Mark Mielke <mark@mark.mielke.cc> wrote:
>>
>> All in all, pretty minor. GCC wants FSF copyright assignment and employer
>> disclaimers? GCC will not have as many contributors. Your choice.
>>
>> There are plenty of projects that we (lurkers / non contributors) can
>> contribute to other projects that are not as mature and require more
>> attention, or even other compilers (LLVM?).
>
> Are you 100% sure that the fact that LLVM does not ask for your
> employer disclaimer means that you do not need to ask your employer
> for some paper to legally contribute code? Are you sure you are not
> exposing yourself to a legal risk? I would check with a lawyer if that
> is the case. A real lawyer, not some computer guy that says "Oh, just
> give us your code, it will be fine. Don't worry! We don't ask for
> anything." ÂAnd a lawyer that is not interested in keeping you at risk
> just in case they need to sue you at some moment.

I thought it was decided in the course of this thread that the
liability of an individual contributor is ultimately NOT changed by
the assignment of the copyrights to the FSF.

Also, Mark's point (I think) is that a copyright lawsuit against the
FSF is much more likely than a lawsuit against some no-name
contributor, and (more importantly) a lawsuit against the FSF is
likely to trigger the FSF to launch a lawsuit against the individual
contributor. Thus, it sort of seems to the individual contributor that
assigning copyrights to the FSF while maintaining 'unlimited
liability' is less safe than not assigning copyrights to the FSF.