Re: On Contributing To Emacs

[Akira Kyle]

On Wed, Dec 29, 2021 at 7:44 AM Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote:
>
> > However, this process has speeded up greatly in the past couple or
> > years.  If you don't get a reply in two weeks, you should ask again,
> > and in another two weeks, please tell the Emacs maintainers.  We will
> > get things moving.
>
> You're saying that as if having a two week turnaround is an achievement
> instead of the failure that it is.
>

Indeed. Speaking from my own experience, I've been putting off getting
my assignment done because apparently, as a university student, I need
to do extra work and find the right person at my school to also sign
off on this. Since navigating the attitudes of the fsf versus my
school towards copyright has been incredibly low on the list of things
I'd like to spend my free time on, I have yet to follow through. As
such I've been less inclined to spend any of my emacs hacking time on
things that touch emacs source code as I know trying to get patches
sent in will require me doing this drudge work first and I'm already
at my limit of ~15loc. It is really a shame that this process is so
time consuming and discouraging for someone like me.

I also have a question that I might as well ask here in case anyone
knows the answer: part of my funding comes from the US government and
work I publish under that funding must be exempt from copyright (i.e.
public domain). Is this then incompatible with the fsf copyright
assignment, and hence mean I cannot make contributions to such GNU
software on time I spend as part of that funding, even if I might
consider it part of my research?