The big reason the copyright assignment. I never even bothered to read it, but as I don't get anything in return there's no point. Why should put obligaitons on myself, open myself up to even unlikely liabilities, just so my patches can merged into the official source distribution?
You are still open to liabilities for your own project, if you incorporate code that you do not have copyright over, the original copyright holder can still sue you. Another reason is the poor patch submission process. Why e-mail a patch if I know, as a new contributor, there's a good chance it won't even be looked at by anyone? Why would I want to go through I a process where I'm expected to keep begging until my patch finally gets someone's attention? We are all humans, patches fall through the cracks. Would you like to help keeping an eye out for patches that have fallen through? Would anyone else like to do this? I also just don't need the abuse. GCC, while not the most of hostile of open source projects out there, it's up there. Manuel L�pez-Ib��ez's unjustified hostility towards Michael Witten in this thread is just a small example. Please refer to GCC as a free software project, it was written by the GNU project and the free software community. Manuel might have been rough, but it wasn't hostile. It seems that the major complaints fall into these categories: - Copyright assignments - Complex and big project with high standards Not much can be done to either of those, the copyright assignments are necessary to keep GCC legally safe. If a assignment takes a long time, please contact either r...@gnu.org or ass...@gnu.org; if nobody says anything then nobody knows anything. Compilers are complex programs (specially if you support as many front ends as GCC does), lowering the quality would be disastrous and nobody really wants that. The bigger the project, the longer it takes to become accustomed to it, and not everyone has enough time to get up to par. This is not specific to GCC, it affects all large projects.
