Yikes, that's an ugly dark side.
> Those artificial barriers make it even more important that those > people who do not mind signing an FSF Copyright assignment do > actively contribute, and if that should result in an invitation to > join the groff project, become committers and help to review and > commit (or reject if need be) those patches that would otherwise > be stuck in the bugtracker. ISC forever! On 28 April 2017 at 23:09, Ingo Schwarze <schwa...@usta.de> wrote: > Hi, > > Werner LEMBERG wrote on Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 07:54:55AM +0200: > > g.branden.robinson wrote: > > >> It'd be nice if 3 year-old bugs could get some feedback from the > >> maintenance team. > >> > >> What needs to happen to make that possible? > > > A new maintainer. > > While that would no doubt be excellent, a few additional people who > regularly propose bugfix patches and who regularly review and commit > existing bugfix patches would already mitigate the worst problems, > even if those people do not take the hat of "maintainer" right away. > > Carsten Kunze has demonstrated recently that providing relevant help > of exactly that kind is feasible and very worthwhile, even without > becoming "the maintainer". > > Bertrand Garrigues has even volunteered to coordinate a release, > and even though that project isn't finished yet, given the excellent > experience with his work on automake integration, i trust that he > will eventually complete it. Unless i missed something, he did > not say that he intends to become "the maintainer", either. > > Yours, > Ingo > > > P.S. > Past experience has demonstrated that willingness to take > maintainership alone is insuffient to help the project if it > is not accompagnied by actively doing some real work on the > project. > > In practice, people who actively both contribute patches and review > and commit patches sent in by others are most likely to eventually > become fit for and agree to take maintainer responsibility - > without having to commit to full responsibility early on. > > Admittedly, in a core GNU project, this normal process of acquiring > new developers is harder than in other projects because new committers > are required to sign the FSF Copyright Assignment (a legal contract > under the law of the State of Massachusetts). That contract does > not only attempt to transfer ownership of Copyright, but also > contains additional clauses requiring the developer to provide some > specific warranties to the FSF and hold the FSF harmless from damage > arising out of breach of that warranty. While it may not seem > likely that a well-meaning, diligent developer suffers financial > loss due to unintentional breach of those clauses, some developers > (myself included) are unwilling to sign such provisions (both > regarding transfer of Copyright and regarding warranties) and hence > cannot become committers. > > Those artificial barriers make it even more important that those > people who do not mind signing an FSF Copyright assignment do > actively contribute, and if that should result in an invitation to > join the groff project, become committers and help to review and > commit (or reject if need be) those patches that would otherwise > be stuck in the bugtracker. > >