Re: Patches and copyright assignment question

Masayuki Ataka <[email protected]> writes:

> Keita Ikumi, who gave me some reports and suggestions, sent me
> a patch for the CVS AUCTeX.  I already committed his one line
> patches.

I already noticed and wanted to tell you: when committing such small
patches (few lines at most) by people without assignment, this has to
be noted in the ChangeLog as "tiny change".  We should not have more
than 10 unassigned lines or so from a single contributor without a
copyright assignment, and only if they are not of some fundamental
quality or creativity (generally, if something is a "good solution" or
"elegant code", something which you would not come by with all by
yourself, it is much more relevant if we have a patch that reformats
whitespace on a dozen lines).

I know this is a nuisance, but we need to keep the copyright tracked
and assigned so that AUCTeX can at one point of time be integrated
into Emacs.  And Emacs, being a core product of the Free Software
Foundation's GNU project, should be only copyrighted by the FSF so
that they can't be dragged into costly legal battles like IBM
currently is by SCO over copyright questions in the Linux kernel.

> But this time, his patch is big, so I'm afraid that he should write
> a copyright assignment.
>
> How do you think, David?

Having looked through it, definitely.

I append a request form to this letter.  Dear Keita Ikumi, if you have
questions about this sort of form, please feel free to ask.  This is
to give the FSF the necessary legal backing to defend the copyright of
AUCTeX legally if it should come into question.  If you have an
employer that might have rights to your work (which could definitely
be the case when you did the stuff as part of your normal work), you
will get a separate paper for him where he acknowledges that he does
not request rights by himself.

What I send here is just the request form: depending on its contents,
you will then get appropriate papers by mail which you have to read
and send back signed if you agree (they mostly demand that you promise
that all changes are from yourself and that you have the right to sign
them over to the FSF).  If you say that this process is fine with you,
we don't need to wait for the process to complete for checking your
changes in: there are, for historic reasons, lots of assignments which
we still have not collected yet, so waiting for your assignment before
putting in code would be pointless as long as we can be sure to get it
soon.

Oh, by the way: (this is not relevant for Keita Ikumi): I was not sure
about how to proceed with preview-latex contributors to save them from
having to do this assignment work once for preview-latex and once for
AUCTeX.  I am now sure: just fill out an assignment for AUCTeX, and in
the list of files for which you are responsible, add the preview-latex
files with a prefix of preview/ (which is where preview-latex will get
checked into CVS once we move it over).  So, for example, list
preview/Makefile.in
if you contributed to this file.

David

Here comes the assignment form:

Please email the following information to [email protected], and we
will send you the assignment form for your past and future changes.

Please use your full legal name (in ASCII characters) as the subject
line of the message.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
REQUEST: SEND FORM FOR PAST AND FUTURE CHANGES

[What is the name of the program or package you're contributing to?]


[Did you copy any files or text written by someone else in these changes?
Even if that material is free software, we need to know about it.]


[Do you have an employer who might have a basis to claim to own
your changes?  Do you attend a school which might make such a claim?]


[For the copyright registration, what country are you a citizen of?]


[What year were you born?]


[Please write your email address here.]


[Please write your postal address here.]





[Which files have you changed so far, and which new files have you written
so far?]