Riccardo On Monday, June 2, 2014, Riccardo Mottola <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi, > > Gregory Casamento wrote: > >> When we discussed the prospect of moving to GitHub someone suggested that >> it "would invite contributions from nonassigned members of the community." >> I'm wondering if this is a bad thing. >> > I think it is, if we don't change things radically. > > If we had several forks with unassigned stuff, how would the main tree > proceed? > The main tree is FSF stuff. One may debate how legal and how enforceable > it is, but it is. > Personally I'd even like to stay in the status of "official GNU project" > even if we are somehow a stepchild. > > If we don't need to assign copyright we could cherry pick the best contributions from the forks. > We couldn't incorprate back things without rewriting them somehow, a > messy, doubtful thing. You're describing the current situation. > I fear that the main tree would remain without some stuff and either > people would be confused with various "gnustep flavours" incompatible with > each other (I have seen that happening in other projects, e.g. MinGW) or at > one point a flavour would become the new gnustep. But then it would be a > mix of FSF + other mixed stuff. > > >> What problems would this solve? I believe we would have a larger variety >> of people contributing to gnustep and it would ultimately remove what some >> see as a barrier to entry since some people don't want to disclaim or >> assign their copyrights. >> > I am seeing instead other projects I participate in, where a lot more > patch review and discussion happens on the mailing list. Actually part if the issue with discussion is that's all it ends up as. Discussion. Nothing ever comes of it. > I think that is positive instead of a myriads of forks. It can lead to > discussion and improvements. Instead we have currently a "commit" and > "maintainer fixes it later" (usually with complaints) procedure. A patch would be so much better than a discussion. Would it not? > >> This is especially pertinent to the move to GitHub since I have noticed >> that when the mirror was running there were a number of forks of the repos >> and a number of pull requests after it was up for a while. Btw, I was >> not confusing git with GitHub. GitHub is a social platform for allowing >> coders to collaborate. This is why I think they move would be a good >> idea. >> >> the patches should have been, in small pieces, put on the mailing list. > It happened once but in a big-chunk manner. Why tolerate doing it this way when you have a built in system for dealing with the patches. Thus, by logical reasoning, my conclusion is that it wouldn't change > without a license change, that is at minimum stopping being a FSF project > (what good would be it if the forks wouldn't?), changing license to a full > GPL/LGPL v2+ or even to a BSD style license. Incorrect. A license change is not necessary. Only the removal of the copyright assignment mandate is. The same could be achieved by forking the project entirely. > > I wonder however, especially the BSD option, if we couldn't even do that, > probably, it should be done by speaking to the FSF, since it is not "our" > code anymore! > > I see a lot of possible implications which I don't like to get into. > > Riccardo > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss-gnustep mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep > -- Gregory Casamento Open Logic Corporation, Principal Consultant yahoo/skype: greg_casamento, aol: gjcasa (240)274-9630 (Cell) http://www.gnustep.org http://heronsperch.blogspot.com
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