On Saturday, September 7, 2013, Derek Fawcus wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 03:54:55AM -0400, Gregory Casamento wrote:
> >
> > Please understand that I, personally, would welcome your contributions
> but
> > we are bound by the limitations of the FSF since GNUstep is a GNU
> project.
>
> Well,  frankly the project is the people who contribute,  without that it
> withers.
>
> If you (and the the other core developers) so desired,  you could maintain
> a fork as the main project respository,  and simply not require any
> assignment.
>
> .pdf


Such a move would require consensus among the core devs and would be
considered a fork of the project in general. Honestly, I have considered
forking the project at some points only because there are various factors
about being an FSF project that limit us.

Mainly this is the copyright assignment requirement since the FSF is rather
slow at processing it and because it is something that many people don't
want to sign.   Also it prevents us for instance from accepting patches
from many potential contributors. On GitHub gnustep has had many pull
requests, but we can't incorporate them since we don't have copyright.

Another disadvantage is the requirement to keep compatibility with gcc.
 From a purely technical standpoint clang is a far superior compiler
architecturally and has much better support for objective c 2.0 constructs
which are common in practice today.  It is trivial to reuse parts if clang
in applications and is nearly impossible with gcc.

All of that being said the copyright requirement does have the legal effect
of removing any doubt regarding who owns and is in control of the code.
 That is the one advantage it carries, but as for forking rest assured it
has been considered by some.

Yours,


-- 
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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