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Comment by hammerandtongs | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't seem to have a copyright assignment policy in place so this can't be upstreamed as is.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Co...

So opened - https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/issues/238

I wish one day the FSF would actually show genuine trust in their GPL and ditch their requirement for people to provide copyright assignments.

God knows how many GPLed lines of code has not been submitted back upstream to them over this minor technicality, and that's such a shame.

I honestly think this is for the FSF to fix, not everyone else.

As I understand it, it's not lack of trust, but rather that if a legal dispute occurs, it's easier if only one party is the copyright holder rather than having to find hundreds of developers scattered around the world.

Let's say that argument is fair enough, at least in theory.

How many legal disputes have the FSF had recently, in practice, where this turned out crucial?

More specifically: how much have they gained by this vs how many contributions have they lost?

Until proven otherwise, I'd expect them to clearly be in the negative here.

So you'll wait until the FSF finds it cannot defend the GPL in court and then try to get copyright assignments from thousands of programmers? That's downright stupid.

If there was evidence that some third party could enforce GPL compliance on behalf of the copyright holder(s) then maybe the FSF should consider relaxing the requirements.

Do you recall that Sony failed to comply with the GPL when they used LAME? The LAME community wasn't prepared to actually do anything about it. That's the kind of shit that would happen, especially to smaller projects. There are big companies out there that want to use your hard work without compensation and shit all over the GPL. Never forget that.

> So you'll wait until the FSF finds it cannot defend the GPL in court and then try to get copyright assignments from thousands of programmers?

I'll rather have code which is harder to defend than defense for code I never got.

Very recent thread (ongoing) discussing this:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2017-07/msg00...

It's just a snail mail of a single page once and for all. If it helps FSF and GNU, that's no big deal for me. I compiled the form and sent it to US from Turkey, and all it took me was about 5 Lira's and a walk to the post office.

It may be a small thing compared to other things, but relative to a PR on Github, it's a tectonic scale difference in workload.

I know plenty of people who won't bother on plain principle, and that's both people and code which the FSF is missing out on.

New times. New standards. Get with the program FSF.

Missing out? I believe anybody who won't bother to compile and send the paperwork does not care enough to contribute good code anyways. There is a working, functional, and pleasing system for those who do actual work, why should a project like emacs (or any other open source project, really) chase the newest fad bargaining the layman's attention and his two lines of patch? What arrogance people show in trying to bend every project to their liking, and going as far as threathening to not do the contributions that they already aren't doing... Good god.

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