Re: What is a week?

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2023-04-24, at 08:26, Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net> wrote:

> Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> writes:
>
>>> Patches welcome!
>>
>> Would gladly do.  Has the copyright papers requirement been lifted?
>
> Of course not, but don't you already have copyright assignment done?
> Our records list you as someone with copyright:
> https://orgmode.org/worg/contributors.html

Complicated.  I did my copyright assignment (for Emacs and AUCTeX, but
I guess this doesn't matter, since Org mode is part of Emacs anyway)
back when I worked in academia as a mathematician.  Now I am
a professional programmer, so I stopped contributing to Emacs -
I suspect I would need to sign a different form.  Also, my employer
probably should do the same.  And I assume that FSF might want to look
at my contract, which is in Polish, so someone would have to pay for the
translation, too.  Quite a lot of hurdles for relatively little gain.
And don't even mention what I think about that requirement in
particular, and in general about copyright law, American law and
American copyright law...

I certainly don't want to sound like a jerk, but I think I do not owe
anything to Emacs.  While Emacs is an important part of my life - and it
does make my life significantly better - I do my best to give back to
the Emacs community.  I wrote 300+ Emacs-related posts on my blog, more
are in the pipeline, I wrote an Elisp textbook (not free, but that is
intentional - I do not consider GPL nor the "free as in freedom"
approach to be necessarily a good idea for a textbook), I encourage
people to use Emacs (sometimes successfully).

To be clear - I completely understand the "patches welcome" attitude to
people complaining that something doesn't work as they expect -
especially if those people are knowledgeable enough to fix the issue
themselves.  I would very probably have done that several weeks ago if
not for the copyright papers requirement.  If you think this is a good
idea, I may spend some time preparing a detailed bug report, but please
don't count on me submitting patches.

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl