Way forward with FSF

[Jonathan Larmour <jifl@eCosCentric.com>]

Us guys at eCosCentric have been thinking a little about ways to move 
forward with the FSF. I have just prodded the FSF again, in a slightly 
more forceful way. I can imagine the SCO stuff is taking up their time 
which won't help.

At the same time, there seems to be evidence that RH are sitting on 
assignments, although one has just come through just now. How many others 
are affected? I seem to recall at least one.

A compromise has been suggested that won't cause problems with the FSF 
later, but will make us more independent of RH (which as we know stops 
some people from contributing). However it needs the buy-in from everyone, 
naturally.

The idea is that instead of assigning to RH, contributors could assign 
direct to individual maintainers. When the FSF is sorted out, the 
individual maintainer(s) will assign everything at that point to the FSF. 
Another possibility is to assign to eCosCentric, and eCosCentric would 
make a public commitment to assign to the FSF immediately once everything 
is going. That might be easier logistically, but I can understand it if 
others here are hesitant about this. But the public commitment may address 
this.

Certainly of the eCosCentric maintainers (me, Bart, Nick, John), we are 
able to at least offer eCosCentric's facilities: mail, phone, fax, etc. 
and are prepared to deal with the admin overhead of doing so. If this 
becomes new policy we'll want new assignments from existing contributors 
so there'll be quite a few to deal with, at least at first.

To be clear, this isn't an attempt to take over :-). All your eCos do not 
belong to us :).  As such, if any other maintainer wants to accept 
assignments (and put up their mail, phone, fax details on the web, mail 
back executed assignment, etc.etc.) then we can easily list more than one 
option to contact on the website. Although in that case, if someone opts 
for that option, they should take care they do not have something in their 
own employment contract that will mean all the IP assigned to them goes to 
their employer! Mark and Andrew would probably be affected by this.

Also, in the case of Andrew, it would probably be advisable to explicitly 
write to RH legal to "cancel" your assignment. For Mark, I guess until the 
FSF arrangement is set up, its probably least problematic to continue 
allowing RH copyright contributions.

Or if people aren't happy with this suggestion, we can just maintain the 
status quo until the FSF is sorted out. We're just looking for a 
constructive way forward. If people want to just wait until the FSF 
resolved since, of course, it should be Real Soon Now, then it may not be 
worth the effort putting this temporary compromise in place. I would like 
to hope this would be the case, but also want to cut our losses.

Thoughts?

Jifl
-- 
eCosCentric    http://www.eCosCentric.com/    The eCos and RedBoot experts
--["No sense being pessimistic, it wouldn't work anyway"]-- Opinions==mine