Re: On Contributing To Emacs

[Po Lu]

Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com> writes:

> The copyright assignment requirement is not forced on us by external
> factors.  With few exceptions, the rest of the free software world
> lives happily without it.  Emacs *choose* to use it in the hope that
> it will give some legal advantages in a future GPL violation case.

IIRC, Emacs did not make that choice arbitrarily, but under the advice
of legal professionals hired by the FSF.

> Whether or not that will be needed in such a trial is anybody's guess
> (including the FSF lawyers, BTW, so they keep insisting) but I note
> that there are several GPL violation cases that have been quite
> successful without it.
>
> Glibc and GCC have recently moved to use a DCO instead.  I think we
> should follow their lead.

You and I are not lawyers, so I don't think we're qualified to make
statements against those of trained professionals.

But I'm going to say that from anecdotal experience that informal
assignments of copyright and "certificates of origin" don't hold much
water in court (not even Chinese court, which doesn't usually care about
the issue in general.)

In fact, this specific issue is why the lawyers at my shop are holding
back the upgrade from GCC 7.5 to 12 when it is released, which doesn't
make sense to me, but there is probably a reason they are doing this.