Non-gcc releases
Anthony Green
green@redhat.com
Wed Apr 7 08:00:00 GMT 2004
On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 21:08, Etienne Gagnon wrote:
> An example situation: as a Canadian [;-)], I do not wish giving away
> my copyright to a non-Canadian institution, regardless of the nobility of
> its causes. In Canada, we have Copyright laws that I know, and a court
> system in which I have much confidence. I can't say that I know enough
> about foreign laws and court systems to give away my code to a foreign
> entity. In addition, if I ever needed to enforce my copyright on some work,
> I have a University to back me.
Well, it's unlikely I will be able to convince you - even as a fellow
Canadian :-)
> I personally have no compelling reason
> to give my code away, and I do not ask my students to give me their code
> either. So, I can understand the reluctance of any contributor to give
> away his code.
> From your message, I deduce that you are facing one old contributor that
> does not want to assign his code to FSF.
Well, I can see how it looks that way on the surface, but it's a little
more complicated than that. I don't want to go into the details until
we're able to make more progress on sorting it out.
> This is my biggest problem with
> copyright assignment: it often drives away potential contributors, and
> ends up slowing a project.
I agree that this is the biggest problem with copyright assigments, but
I don't feel it's too big a problem for libffi. Most of the libffi
contributions from the last few years have come from the GCC community,
who are familiar with this process. And, perhaps I am suffering from a
lack of imagination, but I'm having trouble seeing where we need legions
of new libffi contributors. I mean, the core work is basically done -
modulo a few clean ups, more ports as they happen and perhaps an
optimization or two. It's not really an ambitious project where
development resources are desperately required.
> I would reverse the question and answer: Given the permissiveness of the
> current license, I see no compelling reason to require copyright assignment
> on contributions to libffi.
I don't understand how the license has anything to do with this.
AG
--
Anthony Green <green@redhat.com>
Red Hat, Inc.
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