The 'Delay' Argument

Second, I just have one issue with a specific argument: That by requiring copyright assignment, you add a 'delay' between submitting your code and having it accepted (since you need to sign forms, get them approved on both sides, etc.), and that that delay removes the fun and motivation from contributing.

There is no denying that there is a delay. However, both from his actual anecdotes, and my own experience, I am not sure about how correct the argument is. For one thing, no serious project just commits patches from contributors just like that, they go through a review process (a technical review, not one about copyrights or legalities). And actually that review tends to be *long* in big, 'serious', corporate-funded projects. Those are often the same projects that have copyright assignment of some form. So there is a correlation here that may be misleading. In particular because the technical review process is often more than long enough by itself to kill the fun he mentions of submitting a patch and seeing it quickly committed.

That said, I am not a fan of mandatory copyright assignment. For my own projects I prefer to let people either assign copyright, *or* submit it under a permissive (BSD, Apache, etc.) license, their choice.