On Fri, Feb 24, 2023 at 10:40 PM Hen <[email protected]> wrote: > Yup - though that subjectivity comes from copyright law rather than the > ASF.
I mostly agree with what you wrote, Hen. IANAL but as I understand it that the subjective parts may be more important for the direct copyright issue and not necessarily for requiring the CLA in the same way. I guess the ambiguity comes from "Typically, a work must meet minimal standards of originality" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright#Eligible_works) which seems to be the case for many jurisdictions. So, for contributions that don't get over that threshold, there's some ambiguity about how to treat them. However, it seems it might not matter a lot for Apache, and even less for Pekko. Because for a contribution to an Open Source project we can usually assume that the contribution is covered by the license of the project (as others have mentioned before). So, the copyright case itself (i.e. Apache having enough of a license to distribute and build on the contribution) should be adequately covered in all cases. Regarding the CLA, Apache states this as the purpose of the CLA: https://www.apache.org/licenses/contributor-agreements.html: > The purpose of this agreement is to clearly define the terms under which > intellectual property has been contributed to the ASF and thereby allow us to > defend the project should there be a legal dispute regarding the software. So, it seems to be on one hand another layer of protection that a contribution indeed was contributed under the terms of the APL. On the other hand, it gives Apache a better handle to defend projects against misuse (I don't know if that has ever happened). The more code is covered by contributions under a CLA, the more material Apache can use to defend against misuse (my own naive interpretation). Now, for Pekko, we must keep in mind that probably 99% of all current code is *not* covered by a CLA right now. So, looking at each single case of a contribution, whether we have a CLA on file or not seems to matter only a little. Therefore, I would suggest to set the barrier to require a CLA for contributions really high for practical purposes, i.e. only for significant features or new submodules added. In particular, we would not by default require a CLA for contributions that change existing code (regardless of the size of the change or how many files have been added or removed). Johannes --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
