Re: Contributor to Autoconf

[Richard Stallman]

    | Do you mean that we would ask each contributor to read the page
    | and decide which papers to use?  That would be too unreliable.
    | Probably 20% of them would get it wrong.

    Really?  Is 20% higher than the maintainers' rate?  :)

Much higher.  A maintainer does this over and over.  It is much more
reliable to train a few dozen maintainers to do this, than to have
thousands of contributors do it.

    The silence was an answer :(  

Fortunately that isn't true.  Some of the maintainers said already
that they just assumed someone else was dealing with that contributor,
since they did not recognize his name.  Perhaps nobody was actually
dealing with that contributor--perhaps he had not approached the
maintainers yet.

                                  We will continue as before: when one of
    us will have a slot for an easy job.  But we will do it even better
    than before.

Handling the legal papers is part of the responsibility of a
maintainer.  This is not something new; maintainers of FSF-copyrighted
packages have been doing this job since the 80s.  (We even found a way
to simplify the procedure a couple of years ago.)  As long as all the
code is trivial patches or comes from people who have already signed
papers, you don't need to deal with this; but sooner or later we will
need to accept nontrivial contributions from new people.  Would someone
please offer to take care of this?