Re: Copyright assignment requirement

[Germán Arias]

On 2014-05-30 10:29:22 -0600 Gregory Casamento <greg.casamento@gmail.com> wrote:

> When we discussed the prospect of moving to GitHub someone suggested that
> it "would invite contributions from nonassigned members of the community."
>   I'm wondering if this is a bad thing.
> 
> I have long had a problem with the assignment requirement as it limits
> participation in a project which already has limited participation due to
> it's focused nature.
> 
> Would it not be a good idea to open up contributions to the world at large
> and allow unassigned contributions into the project?
> 
> What problems would this solve?  I believe we would have a larger variety
> of people contributing to gnustep and it would ultimately remove what some
> see as a barrier to entry since some people don't want to disclaim or
> assign their copyrights.
> 
> This is especially pertinent to the move to GitHub since I have noticed
> that when the mirror was running there were a number of forks of the repos
> and a number of pull requests after it was up for a while.    Btw, I was
> not confusing git with GitHub.  GitHub is a social platform for allowing
> coders to collaborate.  This is why I think they move would be a good idea.
> 
> 
> Let me know if you guys have any thoughts.
> 
> GC
> 
> 

This could be problematic. I remember a problem some time ago on Emacs, when 
one developer wanted include orgmode into emacs trunk. One developer of orgmode 
(without FSF assignment) was not agree with this desicion. Of course, since he 
released his work with a free licence, everybody is free to use this in other 
project. But the point was that they don't wanted conflicts with anybody, since 
this can create problems inside community.

On the other hand, everybody is free to, for example, implement libraries 
equivalent to UIKit, CoreBase, .. outside GNUstep project. But it has not 
happened, because there isn't too much interest outside GNUstep project. Or 
maybe there are interest, but not time to do this. The problem is that many 
people think that we have the obligation of work in all fronts. When they are 
free to contribute with projects related with GNUstep, but that aren't part of 
GNU. One example is Etoile project.

And at the end, request an assignment is not painful.

Germán.