Who can help with the GPL v3 effort?

[David Kastrup]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:

> Ben Wing writes:
>
>  > Also, isn't there a rule at FSF that contributions less than 10
>  > lines don't require copyright assertion?
>
> The rule of thumb for trivial changes is 16 lines, IIRC, but the
> problem is that this is *per author*, not per change.  Since we don't
> have authors, we have to get the *total* suspicious lines down to 16
> to invoke this.

I remember 10, but am not sufficiently motivated to search.

It is also important to realize that this is an arbitrary threshold, and
not one for "when is this copyrightable?" but rather one for "when are
we are sufficently sure that a judge will not throw out our case/let
somebody else's case against us proceed on the basis of small code
parts".  There are certainly copyrightable one-liners.

So the 16 lines is more or less an FSF/Elisp rule of thumb.  And the
name for such small unassigned (but certainly tracked) contributions is
not "trivial change" (trivial changes tend not to be copyrightable
regardless of size) but "tiny change".

-- 
David Kastrup