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Not easierNot easierPosted May 23, 2004 16:40 UTC (Sun) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)In reply to: Linus on documenting patch provenance by leandro Parent article: Linus on documenting patch provenance
The FSF-style copyright assignment may (or may not) be better legally,
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Not easier Posted May 24, 2004 4:02 UTC (Mon) by leandro (guest, #1460) [Link] > that would require a LOT more paperwork than a maintainer adding a single line to the patch description [...] Linus is trying to track the path a patch takes, not who owns it. The copy rights assignment thing automatically takes care of the path -- the person assigning the copy rights implicitly states he owns the code, so any misappropriation responsibily is pushed over to the contributor. Who BTW also gets properly identified.
Not easier Posted May 24, 2004 4:35 UTC (Mon) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] Sure. It's still not easier to do copyright assignment.
Not easier Posted May 24, 2004 5:52 UTC (Mon) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] It's not really a lot more paperwork; under the GNU scheme, each contributor would do paperwork only one time, at least until changing jobs, and then a new employer disclaimer is needed. Getting that first paperwork done, and getting the employer to agree, can be a hassle.
What about the trivial submitters? Posted May 24, 2004 12:00 UTC (Mon) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link] > It's not really a lot more paperwork [because]> each contributor would do paperwork only one time[.] Perhaps it /would/ be done only once per person-job. That doesn't eliminate the problem, however. Why? Because what we've then done is make it impossible for an individual to point to a problem and provide even a one-changed character patch (in the event of a detected typo, say), for the first and possibly last time in his life. There are a lot of this type of "trivial" submitters around. People who know C but don't really know the kernel. However, they use a driver that doesn't work, or quits working, take a look at the code, and despite not knowing much about the kernel, see something obvious and provide a bug report together with a patch that "works for them." Then they go on about their normal life, leaving the driver maintainer to check the patch, see that it is indeed a typo affecting a corner case that nobody ever caught before, and apply it. What we are now suggesting is that said "trivial" submitters could no longer submit anything, until they jumped thru a bunch of legal paperwork, that isn't really worth it for that one character. That's obviously an extreme example, but make it a 10-line change instead of single character change, and it's a significant amount of people over the course of a year, I'd guess. Of course, not having assigned copyright does therefore make it essentially impossible to ever change the license to the kernel in general, because it's going to be impossible to find all those <= 10-line submitters from over the years, but that's actually part of the object -- a practical guarantee that the kernel license can never and will never change. Duncan
What about the trivial submitters? Posted May 24, 2004 15:17 UTC (Mon) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link] What we are now suggesting is that said "trivial" submitters could no longer submit anything, until they jumped thru a bunch of legal paperwork, that isn't really worth it for that one character. I don't think GNU has ever required that: http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain_5.html In fact, it looks to me (I'm not really familiar with the process, just doing a google search on "site:www.gnu.org copyright assignment") like they have two levels short of full copyright assignment: for trivial contributions nothing may be required, for smaller contributions a disclaimer that's short of a copyright assignment may be sufficient. --Bruce Fields
What about the trivial submitters? Posted May 24, 2004 15:41 UTC (Mon) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] Trivial submitters on the scale you describe (one changed character, or even 10 lines) does *not* require approval under the GNU guidelines. The GNU guidelines for developers say:> 4.2 Legally Significant Changes > If a person contributes more than around 15 lines of code and/or text Also, on copyright assignment: it's true that copyright is assigned to the FSF, but the FSF grants back to the contributor full unrestricted rights to the code they contributed. So, they can take the code they submitted (but only that code of course) and continue to use it in their proprietary applications if they would like--they have a license to use it outside the GPL.
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