Re: copyright notices (was: Re: Are we (nearly) ready for 3.4 yet?)

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 6 January 2011 11:51, Søren Hauberg <address@hidden> wrote:

> My impression (I don't know the details) is that Sun (and later Oracle)
> required copyright assignment for all changes and that this kept away a
> bunch of people with fairly small patches.

The copyright assignments weren't the big deal by themselves. It's
just that Sunacle was very slow about processing them and kept the
repository under lock and key, plus just accepted very few external
patches in general. By way of comparison, Emacs being a core FSF
project also requires copyright assignment, and although they're a bit
of a hassle, they haven't significantly slowed down Emacs development.

>tor, 06 01 2011 kl. 11:12 -0500, skrev John W. Eaton:

>> Would you be less hesitant if the process were simplified and less
>> time consuming?
>
> I've invested enough time in Octave for it not to be a problem even
> if it took an hour or two to assign the copyright. I'm more
> concerned that it would scare away new people (and we need new
> people).

The FSF doesn't require copyright assignment for trivial patches, so
the very casual contributor wouldn't be scared off by this. Patches,
however, very soon stop being "trivial" when they have more than a few
lines. Right now I personally feel a little less involved because I
don't have push access yet; psychologically the ability of being able
to push without asking permission seems to have an effect of increased
productivity in many cases. I don't think the copyright assignment
hassle itself on the other hand slows down development considerably.

> In case it is not clear, I am NOT against assigning copyright to
> either the FSF or to some Octave foundation thingy.

I don't think most contributors would be. I'm not either (and hey,
maybe this means the Octave Foundation can finally get off the
ground). There are pros and cons, and I don't see a clear reason to
prefer either. If anything, the current method of not assigning
copyright may be easier because of inertia.

This type of thing can be done, perhaps. Projects have been able to
track down everyone and make them agree to some change on the
copyright status. Mercurial comes to mind as a recent example (they
went from GPLv2 to GPLv2 or later). Octave's long history may make
this harder, but the GPLv2->GPLv3 was apparently possible.

- Jordi G. H.