Re: Copyright assignment requirement -why stick to "free" software?

[Gerold Rupprecht]

Hi Gregory, Ricardo,

I recommend continuing to get copyright assignment. It is important for
the users to know where they stand when using GNUstep. Licensing
uncertainty has led to numerous delays in a number of projects.

I personally feel a certain loyalty towards the Free Software Foundation
and their pioneering efforts. They have also promoted our project
several times over the years. Richard Stallman has also from time to
time made inquiries. We fill an important niche in the Free Software
treasure house.

The argument that certain companies are trying to avoid GNU licensed
code is slowly losing out to the reality that proprietary code cannot be
properly or adequately audited.

Auditing is an absolute necessity in all future developments and there
is a certain amount of restructuring already happening.

I have written an article, "After Edward Snowden, are core banking
systems secure?" (originally published at http://www.thewealthnet.com/ )

but you can now read it at

http://www.free-it-foundation.org/article/2013-07-11-after-edward-snowden-are-core-banking-systems-secure

I focus on the banking industry, but I imagine it applies just as well
to your clients.

Do your business clients want to be sovereign over their computing
resources? I certainly think so, and if they are a public, audited
company, it is mandatory. Expect to see the auditing profession to come
down hard against closed, proprietary software soon, particularly that
Edward Snowden has pointed out the extensive level of compromises at all
levels of the software stack actually in use.

This means there is a wholesale restructuring that needs to be
undertaken. Would you want to sign off an auditor's statement today,
knowing what we know about the NSA?

No insurance company in their right mind will be insuring the
auditors... Very few people realize the severity of the problem, and
even fewer are discussing it.

To put it mildly we are in a major IT crisis. The NSA tools can lead a
business or organisation to ruin. The rule of law and constitutional
rights in the USA have been severely abrogated by the NDAA. Many
organisations and businesses are afraid of blackmail and extortion.

Business simply begins to stop functioning properly without the rule of
law and single standards.

I strongly encourage you to prevail with the current road chosen. I
believe we are at a major turning point in software development and we
are on the right side of history.

Free software, with its variants of GNU licenses is the only way at this
time to guarantee the user (your client) access to the underlying source
code, the right to modify it and to redistribute it.

I welcome your comments.

Sincerely,

Gerold Rupprecht


On 02. 06. 14 23:23, Riccardo Mottola wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Gregory Casamento wrote:
>> When we discussed the prospect of moving to GitHub someone suggested
>> that
>> it "would invite contributions from nonassigned members of the
>> community."
>>    I'm wondering if this is a bad thing.
> I think it is, if we don't change things radically.
>
> If we had several forks with unassigned stuff, how would the main tree
> proceed?
> The main tree is FSF stuff. One may debate how legal and how
> enforceable it is, but it is.
> Personally I'd even like to stay in the status of "official GNU
> project" even if we are somehow a stepchild.
>
> We couldn't incorprate back things without rewriting them somehow, a
> messy, doubtful thing.
> I fear that the main tree would remain without some stuff and either
> people would be confused with various "gnustep flavours" incompatible
> with each other (I have seen that happening in other projects, e.g.
> MinGW) or at one point a flavour would become the new gnustep. But
> then it would be a mix of FSF + other mixed stuff.
>
>>
>> What problems would this solve?  I believe we would have a larger
>> variety
>> of people contributing to gnustep and it would ultimately remove what
>> some
>> see as a barrier to entry since some people don't want to disclaim or
>> assign their copyrights.
> I am seeing instead other projects I participate in, where a lot more
> patch review and discussion happens on the mailing list. I think that
> is positive instead of a myriads of forks. It can lead to discussion
> and improvements. Instead we have currently a "commit" and "maintainer
> fixes it later" (usually with complaints) procedure.
>>
>> This is especially pertinent to the move to GitHub since I have noticed
>> that when the mirror was running there were a number of forks of the
>> repos
>> and a number of pull requests after it was up for a while.    Btw, I was
>> not confusing git with GitHub.  GitHub is a social platform for allowing
>> coders to collaborate.  This is why I think they move would be a good
>> idea.
>>
> the patches should have been, in small pieces, put on the mailing
> list. It happened once but in a big-chunk manner.
>
> Thus, by logical reasoning, my conclusion is that it wouldn't change
> without a license change, that is at minimum stopping being a FSF
> project (what good would be it if the forks wouldn't?), changing
> license to a full GPL/LGPL v2+ or even to a BSD style license.
>
> I wonder however, especially the BSD option, if we couldn't even do
> that, probably, it should be done by speaking to the FSF, since it is
> not "our" code anymore!
>
> I see a lot of possible implications which I don't like to get into.
>
> Riccardo
>
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-- 
Gerold Rupprecht
10, rue Louis-Curval
CH-1206 Genève

Mobile +41 79 914 29 52

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