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Forking instead of patch submissionForking instead of patch submissionPosted Apr 20, 2005 15:57 UTC (Wed) by newren (subscriber, #5160)In reply to: Forking instead of patch submission by JLCdjinn Parent article: Lack of developers delays OpenOffice.org (ComputerWorld)
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."
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