Hello Guilers! Until now, we required copyright for “legally significant¹” contributions to Guile to be assigned to the Free Software Foundation (FSF). This requirement did not exist for code not initially written for Guile—e.g., (ice-9 match), sxml-match, etc. The purported advantage of copyright assignment is described at . Your unreachable-but-nonetheless-friendly co-maintainers, Andy Wingo and myself, came to the conclusion that the cost/benefit ratio of mandatory copyright assignment is not good for Guile. Like other projects such as GCC², we have decided to relax that policy. Nothing changes for contributors who have already assigned copyright on future changes to Guile to the FSF. New contributors are encouraged to assign copyright to the FSF by emailing them one of the forms at , especially if they intend to contribute significantly going forward. New contributors may instead choose to not assign copyright to the FSF. In that case, copyright on the new code is held by the contributor themself or, possibly, by their employer—contributors who choose this option are expected to clarify which of these two applies to their situation. A copyright line for the new copyright holder is added to files modified in a “legally significant” way³. Guile remains under the same license, the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 3 or any later version; contributions are expected under the same terms. We hope this to be one of the changes that will make it easier to contribute to Guile. Let us know if you have any questions, and enjoy the good hack! Ludo’ & Andy. ¹ https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Legally-Significant ² https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-June/236182.html ³ https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Copyright-Notices