Re: Notes from the GROW'10 workshop panel (GCC research opportunities workshop)

["Manuel López-Ibáñez" <lopezibanez@gmail.com>]

On 14 April 2010 22:46, Ian Lance Taylor <iant@google.com> wrote:
> Basile Starynkevitch <basile@starynkevitch.net> writes:
>
>> My point is that academics can quite easily contribute to GPL
>> software, but much harder obtain the necessary legal authorizations to
>> transfer copyright to FSF. My intuition is that if (in a different
>> past & a different world which did not happen) GCC was only GPLv2+
>> without the FSF copyright requirement -exactly as Linux kernel is,
>> things would have been much different.
>
> That is likely true, but it's something that we really don't want to
> change.  The FSF could and should make the copyright disclaimer much
> simpler--for example, you can do Google's copyright disclaimer on a
> web page (http://code.google.com/legal/individual-cla-v1.0.html).  But
> avoiding the copyright disclaimer entirely is what permitted, e.g.,
> the SCO debacle to occur.

Have you suggested this to the FSF with this specific example? The
Google's disclaimer is in fact much more complex that the FSF's one I
received, so doing it via web would be even simpler/easier.

And in fact, GCC will be better served if the FSF produced a copyright
disclaimer specific for GCC, because the first one I received was too
vague and general for my university to accept, once it was made more
specific, the university had no problem to sign it.

Could not the Steering Committee ask the FSF to make some progress on this?

Manuel.