Relaxing the copyright assignment policy

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello Guilers!

Until now, we required copyright for “legally significant¹”
contributions to Guile to be assigned to the Free Software Foundation
(FSF).  This requirement did not exist for code not initially written
for Guile—e.g., (ice-9 match), sxml-match, etc.  The purported advantage
of copyright assignment is described at
<https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html>.

Your unreachable-but-nonetheless-friendly co-maintainers, Andy Wingo and
myself, came to the conclusion that the cost/benefit ratio of mandatory
copyright assignment is not good for Guile.  Like other projects such as
GCC², we have decided to relax that policy.

Nothing changes for contributors who have already assigned copyright on
future changes to Guile to the FSF.

New contributors are encouraged to assign copyright to the FSF by
emailing them one of the forms at
<https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/plain/doc/Copyright/>,
especially if they intend to contribute significantly going forward.

New contributors may instead choose to not assign copyright to the FSF.
In that case, copyright on the new code is held by the contributor
themself or, possibly, by their employer—contributors who choose this
option are expected to clarify which of these two applies to their
situation.  A copyright line for the new copyright holder is added to
files modified in a “legally significant” way³.

Guile remains under the same license, the GNU Lesser General Public
License, version 3 or any later version; contributions are expected
under the same terms.

We hope this to be one of the changes that will make it easier to
contribute to Guile.

Let us know if you have any questions, and enjoy the good hack!

Ludo’ & Andy.

¹ https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Legally-Significant
² https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-June/236182.html
³ https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Copyright-Notices

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