Re: On Contributing To Emacs

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

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  > Indeed. Speaking from my own experience, I've been putting off getting
  > my assignment done because apparently, as a university student, I need
  > to do extra work and find the right person at my school to also sign
  > off on this.

I was talking about the copyright assignment, but you're talking about
the employer copyright disclaimer.  They are needed for the same
situation, but in the specifics they are completely different.

The speed of processing assignments is a matter of how fast the FSF
staff do that job.  A couple of years ago, we made that much faster
and more reliable.

Obtaining the employer disclaimer is between you and your employer.
The FSF staff have no way to speed that up; they can't do it for you.

The employer disclaimer has nothing to do with being a student at a
university.  In the US, a university cannot claim copyright on a
student's writings just because perse is a student.  If the work is
for a class, or a private project, the university has no claim, unless
perse substantially uses some special facilities to do it.  (Not just
the internet, printers, ordinary student computing, and email
accounts.)  The university will give you a booklet describing this
policy.

The case where a university does have a claim is when the student is
also an employee and the work is part of per _job_.  Then it's like
any other employment.  We need to know that per employer does not make
a legal claim to that work.

That applies to you because (from what you said) you have a research
job and the work you're doing on Emacs might be considered part of it.

But the university doesn't have to considered it part of that job.
What we do is ask the university to affirm that it does not consider
your changes to Emacs to be work done for your job.

Normally, the person you should discuss this with is your supervisor.
A supervisor is supposed to know how to do this.  If yours doesn't
know, perse will at least know which office to ask.  (It may be the
"technology licensing office" or (yuck!) "intellectual property
office" (see https://gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html).)  If you show
per the form the FSF staff send you, you could get this going next
week.

You can ask the FSF staff for advice about how to go about this, but I
expect they will tell you the same thing I said here.

If the university objects, then you should show the FSF staff the
response you got.  At that point, they can help work something out
with the university.  But this only rarely happens, so don't worry
about it now.

  > I also have a question that I might as well ask here in case anyone
  > knows the answer: part of my funding comes from the US government and
  > work I publish under that funding must be exempt from copyright (i.e.
  > public domain). Is this then incompatible with the fsf copyright
  > assignment,

Indeed, that is an issue.  You can't assign the copyright if you don't
have the copyright.  (That's also the reason we need employer
disclaimers.)

                and hence mean I cannot make contributions to such GNU
  > software on time I spend as part of that funding, 

It's not a problem at all.  Instead of an assignment, you can sign
something different affirming that this work is in the public domain.
It's an unusual thing to do, but not difficult.  The FSF staff can
help you out.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)