Re: Patches and copyright assignment question

From: David Kastrup <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Patches and copyright assignment question
Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 10:38:32 +0100

> 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".

OK.  Please let me ask the format of ChangeLog:

| 2005-02-23  Masayuki Ataka  <[email protected]>
|
|	* doc/auctex.texi (I18n): Removed FIXME comment.
|	Patch by Ikumi Keita <[email protected]>.

The changelog above should be replaced as below?

| 2005-02-23  Ikumi Keita <[email protected]>  (tiny change)
|
|	* doc/auctex.texi (I18n): Removed FIXME comment.


> 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 understand.

Thanks,
---
email: [email protected]
Name:: Masayuki Ataka // (Japan)