On Wed, 30 Oct 2019 at 11:27, Dan Allen <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Grant wrote: > > What I don't understand is the claim that the requirement for a signed > > agreement precludes contributions from individuals.
Grant, you misunderstood, it doesn't _preclude_ contributions from individuals, but it _discourages_ them (in my experience, see below). > > There are a few ways to look at this. First, a contribution is typically > something concrete (like code), and we're not even talking about that at this > point. You can certainly join the mailinglist (once it's set up) and > contribute feedback, requests, and ideas. I seriously doubt that requires a > CLA, though I will need to check. It would be very unfortunate if it did, similarly for commenting on github/lab or whichever platform is used. > > When it comes to a concrete contribution, such as perhaps a section of the > spec document, then yes, a CLA is needed. The reason is, that work needs to > be protected. The CLA, in this case, is as much for your protection as it is > for the collective work. > > We need to come out of this process with a document that has a clean legal > history. Otherwise, it can threaten the totality of the work, and we could > lose control of our own specification / invention. The Eclipse Foundation > knows what they are doing and can provide those services that we'd otherwise > not be able to handle (at least, not without hiring our own legal counsel). Indeed thats important, but the problem is that individuals do not have access to a corporate legal dept to interpret the legal document that is a CLA, and for many its a legal document from a foreign jurisdiction, so besides the annoyance of actually executing the paperwork, there is concern about what it actually means. My experience is that there is a concern that a CLA automatically means they will lose the ability to use their own work, a concern based on the FSF CLA that transfers copyright and so prevents the originator from releasing their own work under another license. So individuals are discouraged from contributing, to use a plain language comment from another forum, its "too much of a hassle and who knows what is being signed up to". > > Before I close this reply, I want to mention that I don't have all the > answers about running a spec. I'm very much in the process of learning. So > while I'm giving you the information as I understand it, IANAL and I defer to > an expert as to why this or that is necessary. Yes, we are being a little unfair demanding immediate answers, but thats simply due to concern about the process or the delays or both. Will try to be patient (but beware, not good at that :-). Cheers Lex -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "asciidoc" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/asciidoc/CAKhWKDNE%2Bya%3D04X63ZSjJOnkUTcuJ%3DYvhzV_zfiT3kZRFxkj1w%40mail.gmail.com.
