Discouraging contributors (Was: g++.old-deja/g++.other/anon7.C)

[Bernardo Innocenti]

On Friday 25 July 2003 12:52, Richard Kenner wrote:

> If somebody spends time learning, say, the Java front end, and contributes
> some nice improvement, but it so happens that it exposes a latent bug in
> reload for some target different than the one they were using, can we
> really tell them "Sorry, we can't accept the work you've done unless you
> spend even more time learning reload" (they might not even have learned
> about RTL)? That's quite unreasonable and doing such a thing will
> discourage contributions to GCC.

You know what is *really* discouraging me? It's this copyright assignment
thing imposed by FSF.

I've done some work one month ago, had to wait one week before FSF
confirmed me that I was eligible for signing papers and they would
send them to me by snail-mail. I asked what happened to my papers
4 days ago and I'm still waiting for an answer. On September I will
be very busy and won't be able to work on it for an undetermined
period.

I don't intend to start a flame-war now, but I'm starting to get
really, really pissed off. I just wanted to spend some of my time
to donate some small contributions to GCC.

I know about the need to hold copyright to enforce the GPL, but
there are so many free-software projects out there that have been
prospering without inflicting legal papers to anybody.

The Linux kernel has a *much* nicer attitude towards accepting
patches without inflicting legal papers to anybody. And this is
probably why it has so many people happily working on it.

-- 
  // Bernardo Innocenti - Develer S.r.l., R&D dept.
\X/  http://www.develer.com/

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