What about the trivial submitters? [LWN.net]

What about the trivial submitters?

Posted May 24, 2004 12:00 UTC (Mon) by Duncan (guest, #6647)
In reply to: Not easier by JoeBuck
Parent article: Linus on documenting patch provenance

> 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

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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
> that is legally significant for copyright purposes, which means we need
> copyright papers for it as described above.
>
> A change of just a few lines (less than 15 or so) is not legally
> significant for copyright. A regular series of repeated changes, such as
> renaming a symbol, is not legally significant even if the symbol has to
> be renamed in many places. Keep in mind, however, that a series of minor
> changes by the same person can add up to a significant contribution. What
> counts is the total contribution of the person; it is irrelevant which
> parts of it were contributed when.

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.