Hi Uli, I cc'ed the mailing list as other people may be intrested in this info. D.J. Barrow Gnu/Linux for S/390 kernel developer eMail: djbarrow@de.ibm.com,barrow_dj@yahoo.com Phone: +49-(0)7031-16-2583 IBM Germany Lab, Schönaicherstr. 220, 71032 Böblingen ---------------------- Forwarded by Denis Joseph Barrow/Germany/Contr/IBM on 23.08.2001 16:11 --------------------------- Ulrich Weigand 23.08.2001 15:38 To: Andrew Cagney cc: Denis Joseph Barrow/Germany/Contr/IBM@IBMDE, Christoph Arenz/Germany/IBM@IBMDE From: Ulrich Weigand/Germany/IBM@IBMDE Subject: Re: re gdb patches (Document link: Denis Joseph Barrow) Hello Andrew, Denis asked me to contact you about the legal issues. >As they say, I am not a lawyer. I can't comment on the validity of a >letter when the digital signature of the attached files doesn't match. >My gut reaction is to think it is not valid. > >Move significantly, I think this need for letters is going to cause >problems down the track. Everytime an IBM employee tries to get a new >non-trivial change into GDB another letter is required. Everytime >someone, not from IBM, posts a patch, and an IBM employee decides to >significantly revise and then re-submit the change, another letter is >required. Of course the 'Software Letter' procedure is not ideal. However, I'm afraid it is currently the only way that is open to us. We have been working on the problem of contributing to FSF projects (with the required copyright assignments) for a long time now, and that procedure is the result of all those discussions. The core problem is that our lawyers categorically refuse to sign the original copyright assignment forms as provided by the FSF, because they feel that various issues are not sufficiently addressed there (e.g. in the area of patents). (I'm not completely familiar with the details, but I'm not a lawyer either ...) Therefore, our laywers have negotiated with the FSF laywers for months and finally came to an agreement acceptable to both sides (and even blessed by Stallman himself ;-)). The result of this agreement was the 'Software Letter' process, where IBM and the FSF have signed a base agreement transferring copyright to the FSF for all source code specifically mentioned in a 'Software Letter'. For every piece of code we want to transfer, we have to make out this letter, referring to the base agreement, and designating the code in question. You're right, of course, that this is more tedious that the FSF's usual way (signing of a 'future' copyright assignment that covers all future changes to a given program), but there's really nothing we can do about that. The 'Software Letter' process has now been in effect for over a year, and has resulted in S/390 code being accepted into glibc and binutils (and also gcc, but that's yet another story), so I hope that we can also manage to contribute the gdb backend under the same rules. Of course, we don't ask you to accept any code where the legal status is unclear. We will make out a software letter for the initial patch that Denis will prepare (with matching signature, of course), and we will make a new letter for any future change where you think it necessary. (I hope that small bugfixes and the like are acceptable without an extra letter, but that's up to you to decide.) Is this acceptable to you? Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Best Regards Ulrich Weigand -- Dr. Ulrich Weigand Linux for S/390 Design & Development IBM Deutschland Entwicklung GmbH, Schoenaicher Str. 220, 71032 Boeblingen Phone: +49-7031/16-3727 --- Email: Ulrich.Weigand@de.ibm.com