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Way forward with FSF
- From: Jonathan Larmour <jifl at eCosCentric dot com>
- To: eCos Maintainers <ecos-maintainers at ecos dot sourceware dot org>
- Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2003 17:22:01 +0000
- Subject: Way forward with FSF
Us guys at eCosCentric have been thinking a little about ways to move
forward with the FSF. I have just prodded the FSF again, in a slightly
more forceful way. I can imagine the SCO stuff is taking up their time
which won't help.
At the same time, there seems to be evidence that RH are sitting on
assignments, although one has just come through just now. How many others
are affected? I seem to recall at least one.
A compromise has been suggested that won't cause problems with the FSF
later, but will make us more independent of RH (which as we know stops
some people from contributing). However it needs the buy-in from everyone,
naturally.
The idea is that instead of assigning to RH, contributors could assign
direct to individual maintainers. When the FSF is sorted out, the
individual maintainer(s) will assign everything at that point to the FSF.
Another possibility is to assign to eCosCentric, and eCosCentric would
make a public commitment to assign to the FSF immediately once everything
is going. That might be easier logistically, but I can understand it if
others here are hesitant about this. But the public commitment may address
this.
Certainly of the eCosCentric maintainers (me, Bart, Nick, John), we are
able to at least offer eCosCentric's facilities: mail, phone, fax, etc.
and are prepared to deal with the admin overhead of doing so. If this
becomes new policy we'll want new assignments from existing contributors
so there'll be quite a few to deal with, at least at first.
To be clear, this isn't an attempt to take over :-). All your eCos do not
belong to us :). As such, if any other maintainer wants to accept
assignments (and put up their mail, phone, fax details on the web, mail
back executed assignment, etc.etc.) then we can easily list more than one
option to contact on the website. Although in that case, if someone opts
for that option, they should take care they do not have something in their
own employment contract that will mean all the IP assigned to them goes to
their employer! Mark and Andrew would probably be affected by this.
Also, in the case of Andrew, it would probably be advisable to explicitly
write to RH legal to "cancel" your assignment. For Mark, I guess until the
FSF arrangement is set up, its probably least problematic to continue
allowing RH copyright contributions.
Or if people aren't happy with this suggestion, we can just maintain the
status quo until the FSF is sorted out. We're just looking for a
constructive way forward. If people want to just wait until the FSF
resolved since, of course, it should be Real Soon Now, then it may not be
worth the effort putting this temporary compromise in place. I would like
to hope this would be the case, but also want to cut our losses.
Thoughts?
Jifl
--
eCosCentric http://www.eCosCentric.com/ The eCos and RedBoot experts
--["No sense being pessimistic, it wouldn't work anyway"]-- Opinions==mine