Re: Evolution copyright assignment: Storm in a teacup

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

Hello,

> One simple question. If the Novell people refuse a contribution because
> the author refuses to sign the copyright over will the code still go
> into Evolution in Gnome-cvs ?

The contributor is free to fork the codebase and do its own testing, QA
and distribution of Evolution.  It has never been a problem, they got
every right to do so.

People then can choose to use Evolution of the forked Evolution.

The same exact scenario would happen with say, Libxml: if someone
insisted that their contribution to Libxml had to be under the GPL and
Daniel (the maintainer) refuses to accept it, they can always fork the
tree and have their own improved edition.

In the end people have their own trust metric for the maintainers: if we
are incompetent (community wise, code wise, patches wise, etc) then
people will use the fork.  

If we do a good job, and the forked version offers only marginal
benefits, people will stick to the productized version.

> The charter permits any member to request a referendum and providing 10%
> of the membership agree it should happen then there will be one.
> Alternatively the board can recognize its a divisive issue and do it
> anyway, which seems the better approach
>
>
> 	-	Accept Evolution
> 	-	Accept Evolution but fork if Novell refuse an
> 		unsigned-over patch
> 	-	Reject Evolution for now

Gnome is a dynamic community, I do not see why `Accept evolution today'
can not mean `If a better tool comes up, we can not replace it'.  

At some point we used Galeon, now we use Ephiphany.  At some point we
used zvt, now we use vte.

It is not like the foundation can not use a forked version in the
future, if the maintainers feel to do their job.

Miguel