Re: On Contributing To Emacs

[Akira Kyle]

On Wed, Dec 29, 2021 at 11:30 PM Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> > It is really a shame that this process is so time consuming and
> > discouraging for someone like me.
>
> The word "shame" doesn't belong here IMO, or at least it isn't the
> copyright assignment process that should be ashamed.  Blame the
> ridiculous software copyright issues and large corporations that are
> behind those, and also dishonest people and companies which use free
> software without making their code freely available.
>

I understand the motivation and the worries. Personally I put more
blame on the laws as they exist, and I support advocacy and lobbying
work for improving protections for free software. I just wanted to
voice my personal experience to this list since I assume most people
here have gone through this process years ago and so it may not be so
apparent that this process does present a non-insignificant barrier to
contribution.

As laws, legal precedent, and software practices are very much not
static, it seems like projects that have assignment processes should
periodically reevaluate whether those processes still serve the best
interests of the project. As Stefan Kangas pointed out, GCC recently
reevaluated their process and decided that it would be in their best
interest to change it. Based on the initial reactions to my original
mail, it seems emacs is not ready to even make such a reevaluation.
Sorry for the additional noise this caused, I just thought it would be
important to voice my frustrations here so that the viewpoint from
someone trying to become a newer contributor is heard. My impression
is that such viewpoints are underrepresented on this list.