Re: Copyright forms for new contributor?

["Joseph S. Myers" <jsm28@cam.ac.uk>]

On Tue, 16 Oct 2001, Joe Buck wrote:

> The reason for not giving out the forms directly was that people were
> sending the wrong forms, making small (but legally significant) changes
> to them, etc.  Since the contract has to be on paper, it works best if
> the FSF sends out the actual paper; before they switched to this approach,
> RMS had to personally check every word of every form, which doesn't work
> too well.

Are there any plans to allow digitally signed forms?  I think Ulrich
Drepper wanted to do this for glibc.

> Just the same, we need a better procedure.  Perhaps we SC members will
> need to take turns being the copyright form liason.  We could set up
> a mailing list for the purpose of handling requests from contributors
> for the legal documents.

We also need a better procedure for maintainers to have access to the GNU
copyright.list listing assignments.

How do the assignments to the FSF interact with the presence of
non-FSF-copyright files in the tree?  For example, some of the files in
the gcc/ada directory are copyright FSF, some are copyright Ada Core
Technologies, some are copyright Florida State University.  If people with
FSF assignments contribute to these files, do their contributions become
copyright FSF (rather than any other copyright holder of the files)?

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk