CLAHub and the FSF copyright assignment

[Sean Allred]

Hello all,

This is my first time posting to this list, so bear with me for any conventions I might unwittingly ignore :)

I’m the maintainer (or at least one of them) of `sx.el', a new and quickly growing StackExchange client for Emacs.  (StackExchange includes all the sites similar to StackOverflow, SuperUser, ServerFault, and the host of other specialized sites such as Emacs.StackExchange.com.)  I would very much like to submit this to the GNU ELPA (and have been invited to do so), but the greatest hurdle to contributing (that I’m sure I share) is the FSF copyright assignment.

Let me be clear: I realize the assignment is an essential and absolutely necessary part of contributing to free software.  There may or may not be discussion on this topic in and of itself — I don’t know — but the underlying concept is crucial.

The foremost reservation I had/have about submitting `sx.el’ is the possibility of hindering development by virtue of the copyright assignment process.  I understand that it’s not a terribly complicated process, but it is also paper-based.  (Disclaimer: I’ve never seen the forms, so I don’t have the experience to base this on.)  This is a terrible deterrent for contributors; it is seen as a significant time investment.

I post here to bring to discussion a resource called CLAHub [1].  This service integrates with GitHub (the repository host for `sx.el’ and a host of other packages on the MELPA) to provide pull request statusing akin to Travis CI and Code Climate. With GitHub’s recent blog announcement [2], this information will be visible on the pull request’s page as the merge is discussed.

Can GNU/the FSF use this resource to fulfill its copyright assignment?

All the best,

Sean Allred

[1]: https://github.com/clahub/clahub; https://www.clahub.com

[2]: https://github.com/blog/1935-see-results-from-all-pull-request-status-checks