copyright management

["Yoshinori K. Okuji" <okuji@enbug.org>]

As Marco agreed, I send this information to the list.

Currently, the copyright handling at the FSF is very confused, and this slows 
down the procedures of copyright assignments very much.

Until now, our policy was to apply patches _after_ the copyright is completely 
transferred to the FSF, but we cannot avoid facing on a policy change, since 
we do not want to delay the development too much.

So I'd like to go in this way as a temporary solution *until the copyright 
clerk gets sane*:

1. When you have not signed a copyright assignment yet, we will ask you if you 
accept assigning your copyright on GRUB to the FSF.

2. If you agree, you send a request form to the FSF.

3. Based on this agreement, we start integrating your patches. To reduce a 
potential risk, we don't give you a direct write access to the CVS at this 
moment.

4. Once it is finished correctly, we give you a write permission to the CVS, 
if this makes things easier.

IIRC, these people are in intermediate states: Ruslan, Vincent Guffens, 
Timothy, Vladimir. Do I miss anybody? Now I must dig out the archive to look 
up all pending patches...

Okuji