[cg505]

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.

[ssivark]

> 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.

[downerending]

Re copyright, what would you prefer? Alternatively, what would you even do with the copyright to your fixes and additions to GNU emacs?

[sokoloff]

I submitted a miniscule patch to tcl-mode (or font-lock) a couple decades ago. It was to speed up syntax highlighting for a particular style of commenting. Maybe a 3-6 line patch, tops.

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.

[Teknoman117]

The copyright release process where I work is pretty liberal, but the amount of people I have to get involved is fairly prohibitive. If your boss doesn't like doing paperwork, you're not going to get a release...

[hvis]

You don't have to assign the copyright when your total contribution is below 15 lines of so.

Just something to note.

[sokoloff]

My memory is that my correspondence was directly with rms on this patch and it was required at the time, but the fact that it would no longer required is definitely beneficial, so thanks for that update!

[serf]

a lot of contributors/developers are bothered by the fact that they have to play ball with copyright laws, at all.

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.

[nine_k]

A cheeky license, or, worse, no license at all is a potential hole for a lawsuit. That is, of time and money wasted, and of the project being at risk.

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.

[downerending]

I can relate. Used to be a hardcore GNU fan, but these days I'm probably closer to sqlite thinking (public domain, but work hard to avoid contamination).

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.

[aspaceman]

Yeah I completely agree. It's like, I agree with GNU and the FSF, but that doesn't mean I'm as strict as they are. I want to contribute to MIT, Apache, and BSD licensed projects as well, or I want to just not think about it and work on some project that has no licensing info whatsoever.

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?

[Koshkin]

> love and admiration

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.

[ChristianBundy]

> A hammer does not have [an agenda], 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.

[Teknoman117]

It's kinda why I like the Mozilla license (MPL). Anyone can freely use (leech even) on the project, but if they make improvements or changes to the project they have to share. It also doesn't try to control how the consumer of the project is allowed to deploy such software either.

[aidenn0]

A hammer is not made up of sentient beings who have moral obligations.

[downerending]

As far as you know...

[aidenn0]

Now that is a comment living up to a username...

[blihp]

There's a world of difference between releasing contributions under the same copyright (i.e. if you're contributing to a GPL'd project, release your code under the same GPL license) and assigning copyright to the FSF. I think that's the turn-off for many. It isn't a matter of 'what would you even do with' the contribution, it's a matter of recognition and making it much harder to change the licensing terms down the road.

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.

[buzzkillington]

What happens when the woke takeover of the SFS is finally complete and emacs is re-licensed under a new social justice license where you can only use it if you don't oppress minorities?

I don't trust the FSF further than I can throw them and I don't trust them with my copyrights.

[coffeecat]

Wouldn't all previous releases be fork-able under the terms of the current GPL in that case?

[_-david-_]

Yes but it would potentially split the community.

[blihp]

Agreed... that was my point. Specifically, it doesn't matter who takes over or what the changes are, only that direction/priorities may change and be inconsistent with the intent of the original contributor.

[downerending]

The existing code cannot just be "re-licensed". It's true that they might decide to make future versions available only under some weird license, but that wouldn't cause prior contributions to become unavailable. Continuing the code line under the original license would always be possible, given effort.

[masoudd]

That's when we fork emacs with the GPL license. You can't retroactively change the license to the code you published as GPL before

[agentultra]

Good point!