Re: re s390 gdb patches

["Denis Joseph Barrow" <DJBARROW at de dot ibm dot com>]

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 <ac131313@cygnus.com>
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