Re: That dwarf2read patch i just submitted

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Kevin Buettner wrote:
> 
> > The patch is actually <30 lines of code, and thus, shouldn't require
> > copyright assignment.
> 
> I'm not sure what the metric is for requiring a copyright assignment,
> but I thought it was lower than 30.  (Perhaps Andrew could let us know?)

GCC uses 12 lines, when I was maintaining GDB I used a one-page rule.
This is just a first approximation though; a two-page file which is 90%
cloned from an existing GDB file hardly counts as two pages of creative
work, while daughter-of-DeCSS in 11 lines should almost certainly have a
copyright assignment.

Remember that the purpose of the FSF policy is to keep GDB free of legal
disputes over code ownership.  If the claim to ownership is weak, or the
contributor died leaving no heirs, or the code is of little intrinsic value,
etc, then there's very little risk of any problem.  (Note that having the
copyright assignment is no guarantee that a dispute won't arise; the
assigner might claim to have been misled by the FSF, or it might be
found that the assigner wasn't the actual copyright owner after all.)
So we mainly need to be prudent and exercise common sense when looking
at contributions.

> > I also modified every line of the patch, literally.
> 
> It is true that you modified many of the lines, but you didn't touch
> *all* of them.

If it were me making the decision, I would not require the copyright
assignment for this patch.  The original contribution is small, it's
been mostly rewritten, it's not a significant new algorithm, and the
contributor seems to have disappeared.

Stan