Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
Basile Starynkevitch <bas...@starynkevitch.net> writes:
My point is that academics can quite easily contribute to GPL
software, but much harder obtain the necessary legal authorizations to
transfer copyright to FSF. My intuition is that if (in a different
past & a different world which did not happen) GCC was only GPLv2+
without the FSF copyright requirement -exactly as Linux kernel is,
things would have been much different.
That is likely true, but it's something that we really don't want to
change. The FSF could and should make the copyright disclaimer much
simpler--for example, you can do Google's copyright disclaimer on a
web page (http://code.google.com/legal/individual-cla-v1.0.html). But
avoiding the copyright disclaimer entirely is what permitted, e.g.,
the SCO debacle to occur.
From what I understood of the runtime exception of GCC, plugins should
be GPLv3 licensed but are not requested to be FSF copyrighted. Of course
such plugin code is not inside GCC FSF (I am expecting it would be
hosted elsewhere, e.g. on some university site; of course FSF owned
plugins -like MELT- are different).
From the point of view of an academic, that makes a significant
difference. And even if he/she want to push code inside GCC (and for
that he still will need the transfer to FSF, unless GCC changes a lot),
convincing his big boss to sign a paper is less terrible when you
actually have some code (in a plugin form) that really has some outside
interest. In that (optimistic) situation, the academic could spend some
of his time to get the legal papers signed.
Before the plugins, the academics could fork GCC (a huge non academic
task) and work on his fork (practically unlikely) or should take the
effort to get the legal papers signed before coding the first line of
code (very hard, and very discouraging).
A university (or research institute) boss in big suit [able to sign
legal papers] is probably more keen to sign a legal paper with the FSF
once some code -from his university- exist which attracts outside
interest, and not before.
And my personal preference on GCC licensing would be more a Linux-kernel
like GPL with copyright belonging to authors employee (I don't feel a
SCO like issue as a major threat today; it might have been ten years
ago). That is much easier to get than a copyright transfer to FSF.
And GCC is probably less threatened today by legal issues à la SCO than
by obesity, obsolescence, outside competition -eg LLVM- and perhaps even
less interest by industry for the low level languages (C, C++, Ada) GCC
is processing. Even in industry, scripting languages (or languages like
Java or C# which are not practically significant for GCC) have more
market share than a dozen years ago.
Cheers.
--
Basile STARYNKEVITCH http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net mobile: +33 6 8501 2359
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*** opinions {are only mines, sont seulement les miennes} ***
