On Aug 7, 2009, at 1:23 AM, Paul Davis wrote:
A few shapeless and incomplete thoughts leap to mind:
As previously mentioned, the JIRA does have an checkbox to indicate
that a
contribution is intended as a contribution. That is intended as a
reinforcement (or an explicit refutation) of the implied license
for things
posted on the mailing lists or in Bugzilla (which lacks the
checkbox). The
implied license for contributions comes from item 5 in the ASL.
5. Submission of Contributions. Unless You explicitly state
otherwise,
any Contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the
Work
by You to the Licensor shall be under the terms and conditions
of
this License, without any additional terms or conditions.
Notwithstanding the above, nothing herein shall supersede or
modify
the terms of any separate license agreement you may have
executed
with Licensor regarding such Contributions.
As I read this, anyone that submits a patch to me on github has
granted ASF license to that contribution unless they specifically
state that their contribution was not intended for inclusion. Its
still my ass on the line as a committer if I put something in SVN that
violates this agreement. The radio button on JIRA is not an absolute
requirement for inclusion.
They have granted you (the Licensor in the case of a project fork
which work on github looks like) a license to use the code under the
ASL. That would give you the rights to relicense it to the ASF.
However, the ASF loses the record of the initial contribution. The
ASF would be unlikely be covered if there was a problem since the ASF
relied on your assertion that it was your original work, however you
would be on the line and the project and users could suffer.
