Re: GNUstep CoreData

[Gregory Casamento]

On Saturday, September 7, 2013, Derek Fawcus  wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 03:54:55AM -0400, Gregory Casamento wrote:
>
> >
> > Please understand that I, personally, would welcome your contributions but
> > we are bound by the limitations of the FSF since GNUstep is a GNU project.
>
> Well,  frankly the project is the people who contribute,  without that it
> withers.
>
> If you (and the the other core developers) so desired,  you could maintain
> a fork as the main project respository,  and simply not require any
> assignment.
>
> .pdf
>

Such a move would require consensus among the core devs and would be considered a fork of the project in general. Honestly, I have considered forking the project at some points only because there are various factors about being an FSF project that limit us.  

Mainly this is the copyright assignment requirement since the FSF is rather slow at processing it and because it is something that many people don't want to sign.   Also it prevents us for instance from accepting patches from many potential contributors. On GitHub gnustep has had many pull requests, but we can't incorporate them since we don't have copyright.  

Another disadvantage is the requirement to keep compatibility with gcc.  From a purely technical standpoint clang is a far superior compiler architecturally and has much better support for objective c 2.0 constructs which are common in practice today.  It is trivial to reuse parts if clang in applications and is nearly impossible with gcc. 

All of that being said the copyright requirement does have the legal effect of removing any doubt regarding who owns and is in control of the code.  That is the one advantage it carries, but as for forking rest assured it has been considered by some.

Yours,

-- 
Gregory Casamento
Open Logic Corporation, Principal Consultant
yahoo/skype: greg_casamento, aol: gjcasa
(240)274-9630 (Cell)
http://www.gnustep.org
http://heronsperch.blogspot.com