Re: Relaxing the copyright assignment policy

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Maxime,

Maxime Devos <maximedevos@telenet.be> skribis:

> On 06-10-2022 22:18, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> Hello Guilers!
>> [...]
>> 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.
>
> What about the following third situation: the contributor doesn't mind
> assigning Guile-related copyright to the FSF, but the assignment
> process can take or is taking a long time or there are some
> disagreements with the assignment contract to resolve (which might not
> even be possible in the end), so
>
>   (1) first the contributor sends the patches without copyright
>       assignment
>   (2) then they are applied (after review, revisions, etc.)
>   (3) once/if the assignment completes, the copyright headers in Guile
>       are adjusted appropriately.
>
> -- this avoids the time delay, while at the same time hopefully
>    eventually doing the assignment.
>
> Would such a situation be accepted? (It doesn't quite fit the two
> mentioned options.)

This is getting complicated.  :-)

A contributor could choose to not assign copyright at first for whatever
reason, and later change their mind and assign copyright for all past
changes.  In that case, all the contributed code would now be
FSF-copyrighted, and we’d remove the corresponding copyright lines.

Obviously we can only do that for *all* past changes and when there’s a
single copyright holder, otherwise it becomes hard to keep track of
things.

I encourage people to choose upfront though to reduce the burden on
committers.

Thanks,
Ludo’.

PS: We can discuss your own situation off-list if you want.