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

[Daniel Berlin]

On Sunday, July 27, 2003, at 11:24 PM, Bernardo Innocenti wrote:

> 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.

Sorry, but transfers of exclusive rights in copyright *must* be done in 
writing in the US.


>
> 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.
>

Which would require a lot of legal hoopla to sue someone if necessary, 
and depending on various laws on event occurrences (IE someone dies, 
etc, and the person who now owns the copyright in that piece of 
infringed code doesn't give a shit about ), might not be possible.  
Only the owners of exclusive rights can sue (and if the various 
exclusive rights were divided among various people, each person can 
only sue for infringement based on the right they own).


> The Linux kernel has a *much* nicer attitude towards accepting
> patches without inflicting legal papers to anybody.

And if they ever needed to enforce their legal rights in the US, it'd 
be a mess.
Basically, this strategy works okay for defensive purposes (IE being 
sued for infringing), but if you ever needed to file an infringement 
suit over someone stealing pieces of code, or something, it wouldn't 
necessarily be an easy task.

--Dan
PS None of this is legal advice, or should be construed as such.  If 
you want legal advice, go see a lawyer. I'm just a law student.