On 04/23/2010 06:18 PM, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
My personal opinion is that this legal reason is a *huge*
bottleneck against external contributions. In particular, because
you need to deal with it *before* submitting any patch, which,
given the complexity (4MLOC) and growth rate (+30% in two years) of
GCC, means in practice that people won't even start looking
seriously inside GCC before getting that legal paper.
Simply not true, you can submit patches without the legal leg work
done. The patch cannot be commited to the tree though. And the time
it takes to do this is less than it took me to read your message...
I don't follow this comment...
Wouldn't contributing a patch to be read by the person who will be
solving the problem, but without transferring of rights, introduce risk
or liability for the FSF and GCC?
I thought "clean room implementation" implies not seeing how somebody
else did it first, as the "clean" part is tainted after somebody
examines the patch?
Cheers,
mark