Re: please update the gcj main page

[Daniel Berlin <dberlin@dberlin.org>]

On Sun, 2005-07-31 at 23:20 -0400, Richard Kenner wrote:
>     You don't really need copyright assignment (IE you can go along with
>     just licenses) unless you plan on suing people over your documentation,
>     which seems even less likely than suing someone over your code.
> 
> I don't follow.  The issue is that somebody claims that the FSF documentation
> infringes on their copyright and claims that the disclaimers on the Wiki do
> not constitute a contract or license. 

This is barely worth explaining, but;

Such a claim would be ridiculous to press in spite of a clear and
conspicuous notice to the contrary, plus affirmative action on the user
to agree to such a disclaimer, such as clicking a button.  The case law
on this is nowadays enormous.  If you want to go ask another lawyer
whether they'd feel the same way, ask them.  I'm sure they'd give you
the same answer *for these circumstances*.  In general, you don't get to
claim they can't do something when they told you they were going to do
it, you said "okay", and then they did it.
We have verifiable logs that they clicked the submit button, submitting
these changes, on such and such a day, at such and such a time.

As for the rest of your views on documentation, you could have said the
same thing of managing bug reports under GNATS that were fixed or
affected by their code. It was extra work, and a critical part of
development,  yet people often didn't do it.  Did that make people's
code contributions "not very valuable"?  And are you going to disagree
that the problem with that process was not, in fact, the tool being
used?  Make a process use tools that people don't like, and they won't
do it.  You can say they aren't very valuable then, but that doesn't
actually help you get your project where it wants to go.

Your views seem very out of touch with what other projects have found to
be useful in producing good documentation in terms of tools and
processes.