On Wed, Jul 27, 2005 at 09:10:03AM +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On Wed, Jul 27, 2005 at 08:30:00AM +0200, K.G. wrote: > > > > Don't contributions need to be copyright assigned to the FSF anymore ? > It depends. > > The Maintainers' Guide says: > > "Before incorporating significant changes, make sure that the person > has signed copyright papers and that the Free Software Foundation > has received and signed them." > > Would you consider this a significant contribution? > I'm not sure...
Firstly, either a disclaimer or an assignment is acceptable. A disclaimer just gives the FSF permission to distribute the code under the GPL. An assignment actually transfers all copyright property rights to the FSF. I suppose the FSF prefers assignments, because it can sue people who violate the GPL on code that it holds the copyright to. Secondly, "significant contribution" is rather difficult to define. Lawyers are strange, and it's probably a bad idea for technically oriented people to try understanding them without serious effort. I suspect the issue of "significant contribution" could be tortured brutally in a court room. Replacing "it's" with "its" 100 times throughout a source file is probably not a significant contribution. Restructuring a 10-line while loop into a for loop, and fixing a bug in the loop at the same time probably would be. I think the patch posted earlier in this thread is clearly a significant contribution that we should at least get a disclaimer for. It never hurts to be cautious. I am not a lawyer... I am just describing how I have handled this in the past, which could be wrong. (I have also had email exchange with FSF's legal counsel on the issue ages ago, which has probably influenced my beliefs here) Cheers, Andrew _______________________________________________ Bug-parted mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-parted
