Reasons Why You Don't Contribute To Open-Source Software

"Over on the GCC mailing list is a rather lively discussion (especially for being a Friday evening) that only started earlier today. No, it's not about the recent GCC 4.5 release or even our GCC vs. Clang/LLVM benchmarks, but it's about development participation. A developer is asking why you don't participate in contributing to GCC?

"There are many responses already, but the GNU Compiler Collection having higher standards for accepting patches than most other open-source projects and legal reasons have been the two most populous answers. Contributing to GCC requires filing a disclaimer that you assign the copyright to the Free Software Foundation. For developers employed by organizations, this disclaimer is often problematic and can take significant amounts of time before it's cleared by various legal departments, here is a good message in regards to that situation as even at least one developer at Stanford has been turned off by the situation."

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