I understand where he's coming from but regardless if he's contributing code to glibc he's making his code part of a GNU project as the library's development was funded by the FSF for the GNU project.
Posted Jun 1, 2011 6:00 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)
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that is the attitude that I was thinking of
if he were to fork the code (which would basically consist of him choosing different hosting at this point, he really has run all the glibc development for a _long_ time), would you still consider that a GNU contribution?
It's very clear cut, actually...
Posted Jun 1, 2011 7:12 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
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When you contribute to GNU you assign your copyright to FSF. As long as you do that yes, it's GNU contribution. Is it voluntary or not is good question, but it's clearly part of GNU.
If the supposed fork will stop assigning copyrights to FSF you can claim it's no longer GNU project (like happened with XEmacs). The history shows it's not easy to maintain viable full-blown fork of GNU software (it's possible to maintain set of incremental patches like EGLibC does - but this hardly can be called a separate forked project).
It's very clear cut, actually...
Posted Jun 1, 2011 13:16 UTC (Wed) by nicooo (guest, #69134)
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GCC is a fork that has been maintained since 1997.
Sorry, but no...
Posted Jun 2, 2011 8:28 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
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EGCS was an experiment in new development methodology and never tried to split from GNU. All changes were always assigned to FSF and when EGCS was renamed to GCC it still accepted FSF's (actually RMS) decisions WRT to licenses, etc.
Basically it never tried to stray away from guidance of FSF so there never was any need to fight with it. Emacs/XEmacs was such a split while xemacs is quite successful you rarely can find it installed by default.
True, association with GNU is very often a burden and the only thing it gives the project is exposure - but this is quite important for free projects...