Re: GCC

[Bernardo Innocenti <bernie@develer.com>]

David O'Brien wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 11:47:07PM -0700, Aaron Lehmann wrote:
>>Copyright assignments.
> 
> I agree with Robert Dewar about showing evidence that this is the main
> problem. [...]

I hereby offer myself as a living evidence against those
copyright assignments <grin>.

Being a fresh new GCC contributor, I can tell you that I have
barely survived the burden of interacting with the FSF to get
the paperwork done.

The original topic was about getting big companies to
contribute, but I'd like to stress that, in many
community-driven projects, most of the development work
comes from thousands occasional contributors.

Most programmers just want to contribute their changes
and don't care anything about legal stuff.
It's very easy to prove: just ask your co-workers and
friends whether they would be willing to go through the
copyright assignment procedure just to see their patch
applied.

I have have finally been able to get the first small
patch in after waiting for over one month. This could
have been barely acceptable some years ago. Today
there are too many projects that make it much easier
to get involved.

In my experience, contributing to the Linux kernel
has been immediately rewarded with the satisfaction of
seeing my patches applied in a matter of hours or, in
the worst case, in a few days.

I guess the problem is just to get started. When you've
finally got the assignment on file, working on GCC and
the kernel can be equally interesting. People are
generally helpful on both mailing lists and the project
infrastructure is easy to work with.

-- 
  // Bernardo Innocenti - Develer S.r.l., R&D dept.
\X/  http://www.develer.com/

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