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Comment by throwaway-org | Hacker News Reader

Other than the issues others have raised about mailing list vs. PRs from Git{Hub,Lab}, here is the information you need to send to the FSF in order to contribute >15LOC:

- [Did you copy any files or text written by someone else in these changes? Even if that material is free software, we need to know about it.]

- [Do you have an employer who might have a basis to claim to own your changes? Do you attend a school which might make such a claim?]

- [For the copyright registration, what country are you a citizen of?]

- [What year were you born?]

- [Please write your email address here.]

- [Please write your postal address here.]

I have several bugfixes and enhancements to various org-babel languages that I maintain for my local code, but I have no interest in jumping through copyright assignment hoops or sharing my age & mailing address to push them upstream.

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With all due respect, I suggest you contrast the effort it takes to overcome these issues versus what it took to start the GNU operating system.

Yeah, that's pretty stupid. Writing free and open-source code is not a privilege. It's a community service. Imagine if you decided to pick up some trash in your local park, and cops would stop you from doing that and ask you first to submit an official form, mail it to the city hall, wait for a few days for it to be reviewed and approved...

If you have never contributed to a properly managed GPL codebase, you might be surprised the kinds of things you will be asked to do. More it the point, it most certainly isn't a right that you can contribute however you want to whatever project you want. Projects have constraints. Some people can _never_ contribute to Emacs because of the other code bases they work on (e.g. Chez Scheme). If you happen to be one of the folks who can, then in a sense, it is a privilege that reflects your freedom from other constraints.

"Some people can _never_ contribute"... the emphasis is around "some". Going back to my hypothetical example of doing community service, sure some people should not be allowed to do that. Let's say there's a person with a criminal record for throwing garbage at people, or someone who is too old or disabled for that kind of work. But it is still quite enormously stupid to create tremendous bureaucratic obstacles for everyone, for the sake of protecting a few individuals or against the potential damage they may cause.

"Few" is a red herring; all it takes is one, and in Emacs's case it's more than hypothetical. They were forced to deal with the threat of the project being stalled due to Gosling/Unipress's stake in some code that was reused in the early days. After that, Stallman said never again.

And in general people people in the current era of open source seem to be sloppier/more reckless than before. Ever looked behind the scenes of Wikipedia (or heck, just perused YouTube)? You know how much plagiarism and copyright infringement is involved? Enough to worry about it. (And in the case of media uploaded to Wikipedia, people have to specifically declare that the work is theirs to license or otherwise is free content, but even with those barriers, there are people still willing to do things that jeopardize the project.) Even if only half a dozen people were ever deterred (and the numbers are certainly higher than that), then that alone would be worth it.

They don’t stop you. They just don’t take your proposal for a better sign at the entrance. Because they already had the experience of artists forbidding them to change the sign for copyright reasons (no, a yellow line around it so people with bad sight recognize it would violate my artistic vision).

Which is the better analogy than picking up trash, by the way.

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