On Wednesday, November 20, 2002, at 03:34 PM, Dave Storrs wrote:
Yeah, well. We don't really have an official pumpking yet, and I've been personally avoiding the issue until we get our sea legs.On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 05:55:12PM -0500, Bryan C. Warnock wrote: [eventual need to refuse stuff from unlicensed people]Hard and fast? ie, patches, even for a simple typo? Or new work, as corrections to a licensed document should imply concurrence.I'm very glad to say that I'm not the one who has to make that call. :> I'm not sure who is--maybe MikeL (as the chief ListOp), or maybe someone at the Perl Documentation Project--but it ain't me.
I've been acting as the unofficial one, since I'm the sap that recommended we start the docs now, and probably the one who'll be doing much of the outlining/writing/editing. I'm happy to do it "officially", but if there is anyone else who actively wants the position, let me or Allison know, and we'll figure it out.
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As far as that particular question, I'm personally pretty comfortable that if you're posting to a mailing list, you know you're putting your ideas into the general public discourse. The catch is whether you have the "right" to give those ideas at all, or if your employer owns everything you do via a nasty IP clause. Note that even if your boss is a good guy, that doesn't mean someone else won't enter the company later with different ideas.
I don't think anyone would reasonably lay claim to spelling corrections, etc. But even small patches could potentially be affected by the nasty employer-IP thing, if you end up submitting a decent number of them over time, or if one represents sheer intellectual brilliance that "improves" the project.
The scenario to be avoided is if you eventually submit enough small patches to represent a recognizable contribution to the project, _then_ Dave asks you to fill in the form and your employer refuses to let you; in essence giving legal notice that we *don't* have rights to stuff we had been using. Then we'd have to remove every meaningful patch & contribution by you, while figuring out what other things might have been tainted by that IP claim.
MikeL
