Developer experience is more than just technical too. I know some package authors (and myself personally) find themselves very disillusioned with the GNU approach to contribution, especially regarding licensing and copyright assignment.
TBF, given the historical FUD baggage, I don't fault them for trying to play extra safe as stewards of the project. Also, Emacs makes it so easy to get packages out-of-band (eg: MELPA, Borg, Straight, Quelpa) that I don't think the copyright assignment is a big deal unless one wants to get code merged into base Emacs.
it's a fact of life for developers with projects anywhere near the GNU-scape that if you don't GNU it, you'll catch a lot of hatred, even worse if you choose to avoid licensing all together -- and gods help you if you choose a tongue-in-cheek licensing agreement like WTFPL.
at the end of the day a lot of people just want to contribute meaningfully to a project that they use and enjoy, but the headache of licensing and catching flak by choosing the wrong one (and since all the communities have opposing thoughts, they're all the wrong one to certain folks), it just becomes easy to 'forget to contribute' -- especially when your patch or whatever is working fine locally and there is little practical incentive to catch that much heat.
I think the legalese issues turns a lot of would-be contributors into local-patcher type developers, and then they leave for greener pastures once what they needed patched is on their own machine -- especially for projects like emacs where 90 percent of development is going to be towards extensions.
...and I say all this from a position of love and admiration for GNU and the FSF.
But (some definitely not all) folks are pretty all or nothing. There's a lot of jerk developers on the net though, maybe it's better to just ignore them?
As for contributions, presumably GNU wants ownership, but do they have a problem with assigning back what amounts to public domain rights to the author?
And I suppose, for most contributions, does it really matter? The awful truth is that I can't think of anything I've ever written that had freestanding value, as opposed to value as an enhancement to something else.
I don't know about that, I hate agendas. A hammer does not have one, and that does not make it a less useful tool.
Sure, but by default all software has a copyright agenda built in. We can remove copyright, but there are two approaches:
- Remove copyright so that anyone can use your code, but then they can re-add copyright to your code and sue other people for violating their copyright.
- Remove copyright so that anyone can use your code and ensure that nobody can re-add copyright to your code.
I used to be in the former camp, but I've slowly moved to the latter.
I see why you might go with Apache, or MIT, or even straight public domain licenses. But as a maintainer, I would not accept a contribution which is not properly licensed, or which is licensed in a way not compatible with the project's license. Usually such a contribution is less valuable than the rest of the project, so there's no point to introduce a real legal risk of project's closure for the sake of such a contribution.
For those who just want to bury their head in the sand and pretend copyright doesn't exist, they will be the first to complain when the code that they wrote is taken private and commercialized (i.e. look at the licenses this has been an issue for)... making code 'public domain' allows for that.
I don't trust the FSF further than I can throw them and I don't trust them with my copyrights.
I spent 20x more time back and forth on copyright assignments, including getting a release from my company, etc to get the patch in. I pushed through because I felt like I was always "just one more yak shave away from finishing", but if I knew at the start how much time it was going to take, I'd have kept the patch on our own private site-lisp. That's a problem, IMO.
Just something to note.