Re: [MiNT] Official m68k-atari-mint target for the binutils and GCC.

[Vincent Rivière <vincent.riviere@freesbee.fr>]

Adam Klobukowski wrote:
> Vincent, could you describe how this process looks like? It does not
> seem there are any NDA's ;)

Easy.

- When you want to contribute with minor bugfixes or patches to the FSF 
projects, you just have to send them to the project's mailing list (or 
better: Bugzilla) and if they are good, they will be committed. I 
contributed to fix a few binutils bugs like that. You don't own your 
changes, they are not significant.

- When you want to provide a significant contribution (new files, new 
targets...) to the FSF projects, things are more complicated. The FSF rules 
are even stronger than the GPL: they require we *give* our work to the FSF, 
so they own it, they put their own copyright on your files. As a result, 
their lawyers can do their job if someone else violates the license (usually 
GPL). Don't worry, even if you *give* your own work to the FSF, they give 
you back the right to do what you want with your own work (including 
redistributing it with closed source licenses, etc.).
All the original authors of the contributed sources have to sign those 
papers. This is why Guido and I did it. First we filled that form:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/Copyright/request-assign.future
After that, we signed a document like that one (which is similar but 
unrelated to our projects):
http://www.hitech-projects.com/euprojects/ACOTES/deliverables/acotes_d6.1_final.pdf
We had to send it by postal mail to the US.
After that, we can legally provide major changes to the FSF projects.

- After that, we have to send the actual changes to the project's mailing 
lists, discuss with the project's managers to get things accepted, etc... 
That's the real part of the job (still to be done).

--
Vincent Rivière