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Re: Copyright assignment requirement


From: Gregory Casamento
Subject: Re: Copyright assignment requirement
Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2014 13:12:13 -0400

Hi

On Tuesday, June 3, 2014, Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola@libero.it> wrote:
Hi,

Gregory Casamento wrote:

    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.

Actually part if the issue with discussion is that's all it ends up as.  Discussion.  Nothing ever comes of it.

Culture, we do not encourage it happening. 

This is a very very bad culture then. Part of the issue is that we don't really have the tools set up to facilitate it. People post to the list and things may or may not be accepted. 

The contributions are further reduced by the fact that many people don't want to go through the assignment process as it is slow and cumbersome.  Even with the new PDF signing process. 
 
I see what happens on projects ranging from OpenBSD, mingw... to even GNU-HURD!
I see tons of patches flowing in the HURD mailing list, believe it or not, reviewed, commented...

 Obviously that doesn't work here. 

A patch would be so much better than a discussion. Would it not?

Patches exist only if somebody works on them, if you encourage them and take care of them. Your sarcasm is out of place.

You infer sarcasm where none was intended. This illustrates part of my point.   

    the patches should have been, in small pieces, put on the mailing
    list. It happened once but in a big-chunk manner.


Why tolerate doing it this way when you have a built in system for dealing with the patches.

Again, your sarcasm is out of place. I cite how I see other projects work and strive discussion and collaboration and comparing it to our current situation.

I think it's interesting that asking you to see the utility if something objectively is viewed as sarcasm.  

GitHub has more tools to basically creat a pipeline of patches for maintainers to consider.  The mailing list is as hoc and difficult.  Also if there is a system in place to handle them it encourages potential contributors to submit them. 

As it is now we often lose track of them or they get lost in the discussion.  For myself I get over 500 emails a day from various sources.  Having a dedicated patch tracking and review system would help immensely. 

You are suggesting that the change of platform with social coding would give a surge of collaboration and for what you want to remove copyright assignment.

I point out that we could do the same without changing platform, but by working with our beloved mailing list.
Also, we should give up the mailing list then and go towards forum and ticket post communication.

I don't agree.  I believe this is only a mere small step above the current situation. What we need is a radical change. 
 
    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.


Incorrect.  A license change is not necessary.  Only the removal of the copyright assignment mandate is. The same could be achieved by forking the project entirely.
Not necessary, but useful to take your reasoning of benefits to its maximum.

It could be interesting to switch back to v2+ though, it would be worth discussing.

Actually this is something worth considering. I have thought many times that our move to GPLv3 was premature. It was a community decision, but one I initiated.   I think asking the FSF if we can move back to GPLv2.x+ isn't a bad idea.
 
And if you ask "how do you feel moving to git" or "how do you feel about removing copyright requirement" my answer is simple: short.

 

Riccardo

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Greg  


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Gregory Casamento
Open Logic Corporation, Principal Consultant
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