Re: On Contributing To Emacs

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > I wish this process was more transparent than "send an email to
  > assign@gnu.org and wait for a response". Why can't there be some
  > webpage that outlines the process along with the necessary forms that
  > I can follow and collect then send to assign@gnu.org?

The instructions are complex, and depend on circumstances.  We can
send them to a contributor who wants to know all the options we can
handle; but having each contributor figure out what to do would be a
lot more work for each, and would be unreliable.

So the easy way is to let the FSF staff ask the contributor for the
pertinent facts, then recommend what papers to use.  It is faster and
less work for the contributor, and less likely to lead to errors.
Please do not try to figure out on your own how to do that -- discuss
it with the staff.

Just in case this might have changed in the past few years, I asked
the staff to verify it still works that way.

  > Such resources exist but I, as a relatively
  > uninformed newcomer to such issues, have to find them myself,

You don't need those resources to submit FSF copyright papers.  I will
look at the page you mentioned, but I doubt that SFC is trying to
explain how to do that.

-- 
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)