Update to GCC copyright assignment policy

[Jason Merrill]

On Tue, Jun 1, 2021 at 11:15 AM Jose E. Marchesi via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
wrote:

>
> > GCC was created as part of the GNU Project but has grown to operate as
> > an autonomous project.
> >
> > The GCC Steering Committee has decided to relax the requirement to
> > assign copyright for all changes to the Free Software Foundation.  GCC
> > will continue to be developed, distributed, and licensed under the GNU
> > General Public License v3.0. GCC will now accept contributions with or
> > without an FSF copyright assignment. This change is consistent with
> > the practices of many other major Free Software projects, such as the
> > Linux kernel.
> >
> > Contributors who have an FSF Copyright Assignment don't need to
> > change anything.  Contributors who wish to utilize the Developer
> Certificate
> > of Origin[1] should add a Signed-off-by message to their commit messages.
> > Developers with commit access may add their name to the DCO list in the
> > MAINTAINERS file to certify the DCO for all future commits in lieu of
> individual
> > Signed-off-by messages for each commit.
> >
> > The GCC Steering Committee continues to affirm the principles of Free
> > Software, and that will never change.
> >
> > - The GCC Steering Committee
> >
> > [1] https://developercertificate.org/
>
> Eer, so you are changing the license of GCC from GPLv3+ to GPLv3 only??
>

No, there is no change in the license.


> Why current contributors (individuals and corporations) have not been
> consulted before making and implementing such important decisions?
>
Corporations like my employer contribute to GCC under a certain legal
> setup.

Changing the conditions under which the contributions happen is
> not something to be done unilaterally without a very good reason. The
> mere fact you have sent this email to a public mailing list means I have
> to get my management involved, and most probably lawyers too.
>

Your employer is very welcome to continue to contribute under the same
legal setup.

Derived versions of GCC could already include code that was not assigned to
the FSF; even the official GCC distribution itself has long included
non-FSF-assigned code in various runtime libraries.
The change is that now we will also be able to incorporate such code into
the source code repository for the compiler.

Jason