Re: Emacs CLA requirement

[Phillip Lord]

I think as well as annoying, it's also extremely time consuming. Not too
bad for a single individual, of course, but if you have a package with
30+ authors then it's painful. You need to find all those authors, work
email them all, get them all to follow through the process separately
and then tell you when they have finished. The work for the authors is
not huge, although if they need an employer waiver of rights, then it
can take several months while their employer works out what it all
means.

The practical upshot of this is, I think, less software gets into Emacs,
fewer people contribute patches, and a much higher likelihood of
duplicated functionality (c.f. seq.el and dash.el) between packages in
and out of the copyright assigned pool.

The arguments on why assign are, I am sure, correct, but they are not
absolute. Indeed not all of the Emacs is copyright assigned or even
GPL'd -- there is public domain also -- so we can already see this. The
question is which you set of consequences do you gain/suffer from most?

Phil



Phil Sainty <psainty@orcon.net.nz> writes:

> I'm not a lawyer, but I can only presume that
> https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html still applies?
>
> If so then I imagine it's every bit as necessary as it's ever
> been -- an annoying (but generally minor) hurdle to contribution
> which is nevertheless necessary for the FSF to have the ability
> to defend the code legally (which I presume remains important).
>
> My take on this has always been that FSF legal people understand
> the issues and have spent many, many hours thinking about them;
> whereas I rather suspect that *most* of the people complaining
> about the need for copyright assignment do not have the same
> level of understanding.
>
> The arguments I've *seen* against copyright assignment have
> generally been based on convenience -- it's annoying, and so
> people won't contribute because it's annoying.  I don't recall
> seeing arguments which actually address the reasons that
> assignment is required in the first place.  I don't see how
> the requirement could be dropped without addressing those
> specific issues.
>
> I haven't been following any GCC or glibc discussions, though.
> If they have reliably determined that the FSF can in fact
> legally defend arbitrary GNU project code by itself, without
> the involvement of any other copyright holders, then perhaps
> the situation is different.
>
>
> -Phil