On assignment as it relates to enforcement

Posted Dec 22, 2012 18:24 UTC (Sat) by heijo (guest, #88363)
In reply to: On assignment as it relates to enforcement by bkuhn
Parent article: GnuTLS, copyright assignment, and GNU project governance

The problem is that most people just won't bother to contribute if they have to send anything in the mail to do so.

It's already a miracle that someone contributes for free, and making him do ANYTHING boring, costly or time consuming, like mailing paper documents, is the quickest way to drive most contributors away.

IMHO copyright assignment is insane for this reason.

It's far more important to further improve the software than to be better able to defend it, especially since it's really rare that a GPL violator effectively competes with the original software, as opposed to just making a derivative for a niche market.

On assignment as it relates to enforcement

Posted Jan 3, 2013 11:20 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link] (2 responses)

Yes. *precisely* this.

It's a -huge- barrier. Sending a pull-request on GitHub for a 20-line fix you made is a 2-minute job.

Printing, enveloping, adressing, signing, driving to post-office, buy postage (to an abroad location, ofcourse), mail, wait for a week or a month -- *then* send a 20-line patch ?

Forget it. Not happening.

On assignment as it relates to enforcement

Posted Jan 7, 2013 2:43 UTC (Mon) by jrn (subscriber, #64214) [Link] (1 responses)

The FSF accepts scanned and emailed paperwork these days, at least sometimes.

On assignment as it relates to enforcement

Posted Jan 17, 2013 14:28 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

>The FSF accepts scanned and emailed paperwork these days, at least sometimes.

Only for those in the US and Germany, AFAICT. Probably not coincidentally, those are the countries for which the paper version is already least onerous, as it doesn't require international mail.