I am not a lawyer this is not legal advice.
Search for copyright assignment agreements, there are a few good template documents. I’d request a signed document instead of simply stating it in the PR. In all cases I would recommend verifying the document and process by a lawyer before you start using it.
Also, I would consider not requiring copyright assignment if at all possible for the project in question.
First, thanks for working on Pharo, what an amazing environment.
I am not a lawyer so you should double check.
For GPL, indeed the image as a whole would be GPL. If the personal project is more of an “executable”, it might be what you are looking for, any further image modification would have to be released under the GPL as well.
If the project is more of a “library”, you might or might not prefer the LGPL. In this case I feel like https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-java.en.html would apply similarly to Java. As long as you can load the image and change the original library code, other code is not restricted on the license.
There are other ways to structure and edit programs than just a bunch of source files that we manually edit through a text editor. For instance image files as in Smalltalk. I don’t see any reason why a visual representation couldn’t succeed in this regard. The issue, imo, is that text is really nice to work with, and it would require a very nice visual editing experience to beat the text based tools we have today.
Not how I understand it, but I’m not a lawyer. The user that uses the script to generate the code can copyright the output and oop can copyright their script (and the output they themself generate). If it worked like you said, it would be trivial to write a script that generates all possible code by enumerating possible programs, then because the script will eventually generate your code, it’s already copyrighted. This appear absurd to me.
Relevant: https://www.vice.com/en/article/musicians-algorithmically-generate-every-possible-melody-release-them-to-public-domain/
If the script copies chunks of code under the copyright of the original script writer, I typically see for those parts that the original owner keeps copyright of those chunks and usually license it in some way to the user. But the code from the user input part is still copyrightable by the user. And that’s that last part that is most interesting for the copyright of AI works. I’m curious how the law will settle on that.
I’m open to counterarguments.