Hello webwarrior
It would be logical to make contribution to an open source project easy, right? Yes but not at the price of legal mess. Well, in bigger projects some burocracy is inevitable, but usually has some valid reasons behind it. We have strong reasons and they are quite baked by experience. Read below.
When I made some commits to Spec (while it was on github), it was as easy as fork->commit->create pull request.
And so what? Even if tomorrow Pharo will be on git and work on pull request. Do not expect that you will not have to sign a license agreement.
In Pharo, it's already more complicated: you have to register yourself in SmalltalkHub, in fogbugz, in mailing lists. Not in mailing-lists. Fogbugz is a professional bug tracker. The company offered it to us. It costs 25$ per month per seat. I thank them for that :). Even if I sometimes hate its interface. I lowers our energy to work to something else than a buggy bug server. Slices system is also not very intuitive. Well saving a composite packages to help us manage changes is not that difficult. Press the +slice, enter the number, select the package to save + save. It should ok. Then CI system spits out some completely unrelated errors. To you think that we are not burned ourselves by such errors? Seriously?
But OK, I understand that Pharo is unlike, and the team maybe doesn't have time to migrate to some integrated bugtracker/repository/whatever. We will keep fogbugz because it is working well and it contains important discussions.
Then people began asking me of my real name - which is already wierd - why would they need it?
I asked you because I prefer to talk to real people and I do not want to be manipulated. Let us imagine that a nasty person would like to hurt Pharo, using a pseudo, and publish stolen GPL code and that we use it and after a while this pseudo disappears and somebody else declare: oh pharo is bad because they steal GPL code so all Pharo is GPL. You see when Ben changed the license of Spec he really wanted to damage us. We had to ask layywers to take actions. And frankly we have something else to do. Do you think that it would be better that I'm called BozoTheClown? I prefer that people understand that when I do a statement this is me that is doing it. Now you can keep you pseudo but we should not accept your code until you sign the license agreement (even if any code publish in the pharo repo is declared as MIT).
And then someone suggested that I must sign license agreement (which is also wierd - MIT license doesn't demand anything like that).
In the past, we got **burned** by the licensing problems of Squeak. I remember spending something like 30 emails by linux conferences to have the possibility to present Squeak. I had a folder full of such emails. Just because the license of Squeak mentioned fonts that were not even in Squeak anymore. Then ViewPoint spent a year collecting author agreements so that their code could be relicensed into MIT. We then (thanks Gabriel Cotelli) did blind rewrite of orphan methods. Now we have something else to do - see again.
I looked at that agreeement. It requires you to provide name, address (???), sgin it and send it via snail mail (WTF???). We took the agreement that was used for Squeak by ViewPoint research. Their laywers are probably right. You can scan it and send it to us. You can put a fake address if you want.
No, guys, that is beyond good and evil. Either we skip this stupid formality and continue working on the code, or I'm out of this.
I'm sorry but we do not accept code into Pharo from people that did not sign the license agreement. We accept as a temporarily measure that you acknowledge that the code is MIT when you publish to the Pharo repo. Now I found the tone of your email a bit misplaced. The Pharo community is a community of friendly people. We know and appreciate each other. We drink beers together and have fun. We are building great software and enjoy it. If printing or even editing a pdf and sending a pdf is a problem for you, do not do it. But it would have taken you, the time to write this mail and everybody would be happy. I imagine that you understand that we do not do that for the fun of it. I prefer to code. Stef PS: I would be forcing everybody to use PGP for email and code, if you ask me.