Forking instead of patch submission [LWN.net]

Forking instead of patch submission

Posted Apr 20, 2005 15:24 UTC (Wed) by JLCdjinn (subscriber, #1905)
In reply to: Lack of developers delays OpenOffice.org (ComputerWorld) by newren
Parent article: Lack of developers delays OpenOffice.org (ComputerWorld)

Thank you for that analysis; it helped me to understand the situation better. I have a follow-up question.

Let's consider one of the projects that requires copyright assignment in some form, but which is licensed under the GPL. What happens if you fork this project and then later the original project wants to merge some of your work (each action being allowed by the terms of the GPL, as far as I understand)? Does such a project refuse to cherry-pick from good forks because of a lack of copyright assignment? If they do take code from your fork, is it true that you (the creator of the fork) still hold the copyright to any modifications in the fork? If so, doesn't this circumvent the patch submitting rules?

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Forking instead of patch submission

Posted Apr 20, 2005 15:57 UTC (Wed) by newren (subscriber, #5160) [Link]

Patch submission rules aren't legal requirements; they're practice that a project has decided upon. They can decide to change their practices. It's just that they need to weigh the consequences--if they take patches without a copyright assignment then they are no longer the sole copyright owners and thus legal cases to defend against copyright infringement of the code becomes more difficult.

In fact, there's a real world example of the exact situation you propose--emacs and xemacs. According to http://www.xemacs.org/About/XEmacsVsGNUemacs.html, RMS has stated, "we can't use XEmacs in the GNU system: using it would mean paying a price in terms of our ability to enforce the GPL....There is good code in XEmacs, which I'd be happy to have in a merged Emacs any day. But I cannot copy it out of XEmacs myself because of the uncertain authorship and/or lack of legal papers."