Why not contribute? (to GCC)

[Mark Mielke]

On 04/23/2010 06:18 PM, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
>     My personal opinion is that this legal reason is a *huge*
>     bottleneck against external contributions. In particular, because
>     you need to deal with it *before* submitting any patch, which,
>     given the complexity (4MLOC) and growth rate (+30% in two years) of
>     GCC, means in practice that people won't even start looking
>     seriously inside GCC before getting that legal paper.
>
> Simply not true, you can submit patches without the legal leg work
> done.  The patch cannot be commited to the tree though.  And the time
> it takes to do this is less than it took me to read your message...
>    

I don't follow this comment...

Wouldn't contributing a patch to be read by the person who will be 
solving the problem, but without transferring of rights, introduce risk 
or liability for the FSF and GCC?

I thought "clean room implementation" implies not seeing how somebody 
else did it first, as the "clean" part is tainted after somebody 
examines the patch?

Cheers,
mark