From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 2100 invoked by alias); 8 Aug 2003 18:17:17 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: Sender: gcc-owner@gcc.gnu.org Received: (qmail 2092 invoked from network); 8 Aug 2003 18:17:16 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO develer.com) (151.38.19.110) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 8 Aug 2003 18:17:16 -0000 Received: (qmail 20743 invoked from network); 8 Aug 2003 18:17:09 -0000 Received: from beetle.trilan (HELO develer.com) (?4kXVJuUwGe7dbszGiwJ8uJzz4bGG3HWn?@10.3.3.220) by ns.trilan with SMTP; 8 Aug 2003 18:17:09 -0000 Message-ID: <3F33E924.3070107@develer.com> Date: Fri, 08 Aug 2003 19:05:00 -0000 From: Bernardo Innocenti Organization: Develer S.r.l. User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030703 X-Accept-Language: en, en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 To: obrien@FreeBSD.org CC: Aaron Lehmann , Steven Bosscher , gcc@gcc.gnu.org Subject: Re: GCC References: <1059633859.3637.8.camel@steven.lr-s.tudelft.nl> <20030731064707.GA20389@vitelus.com> <20030804044232.GA33831@dragon.nuxi.com> In-Reply-To: <20030804044232.GA33831@dragon.nuxi.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SW-Source: 2003-08/txt/msg00487.txt.bz2 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 . 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/ Please don't send Word attachments - http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html