Dear FSF copyright assignment clerk, I am the maintainer of two Emacs add-ons: Vimpulse[1] and viper-in-more-modes[2]. Vimpulse is still too buggy to ship with Emacs, and I don't use or care much about viper-in-more-modes so have never even evaluated whether they can ship with Emacs. But I would like to start getting copyright assignments for both add-ons now so that they can ship with Emacs eventually. I care so little about viper-in-more-modes that I will not talk about it in the rest of this email. The rest of this email talks about Vimpulse only. I am not a main contributor. There are two main contributors: Alessandro Piras (in Italy) and Brad Beveridge (I think in Canada). They said they are both willing to sign copyright assignment papers. I have contributed maybe 5 lines of code and dozens of lines of documentation. I have already disclaimed all copyright to my contributions and placed my contributions in the public domain, but I will gladly sign papers too if you like. Question 1: Is it good that I have placed my contributions in the public domain? (I live in Canada.) There have been some other contributors. I have no idea exactly how many; I would have to look at each of the 80 old email threads in my inbox relating to Vimpulse. Maybe I will move them all into the Vimpulse bug tracker at ourproject.org, which is currently empty, for ease of future tracking. The following are estimates based on memories from last year: Some people have contributed one- or two-line fixes. Perhaps half a dozen (or maybe less) people have contributed larger amounts of code: e.g. ten to twenty lines. Question 2: What is the minimum number of lines that requires copyright assignment? (I tried doing a Google search for 'fsf copyright assignment' and found the old document [3] from 'prep' which refers to various files that let me check whether papers have been received and talk more about the various options (assign vs. disclaim) and such. But I couldn't find the files it refers to. It would be wonderful if you could put those files up on the web. Q3: What if someone contributes code which does nothing but define keybindings (keyboard shortcuts)? Q4: Should I include lines of documentation / comments in my count of lines of code? How about blank lines? Q5: There are several unreviewed patches in my inbox. Do you recommend I leave them unreviewed until I have gotten copyright assignment for them? Q6. How about if I tell the pending patch contributors, "Please contact assignments @ gnu.org so you can assign your contributions to the FSF (this is best) or disclaim copyright to your contributions and put them in the public domain (if you are unwilling to assign copyright). After that, please test your patch, and if it tests OK, please merge it into Vimpulse on the EmacsWiki." Please Reply to All. Thanks in advance, --Jason Spiro ^ [1]. http://www.emacswiki.org/elisp/vimpulse.el ^ [2]. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/viper-in-more-modes.el ^ [3]. http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Papers.html