Hi Vincent,
The only reason I see for a CLA is to allow the organization to relicense
the
code under a different license. Being difficult to re-license makes the
project more stable and I don't see any major problems with the LGPL.
The idea that "every project needs a CLA" which seems to be implied by
oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/cla is easily dispelled by the fact that Linux,
one of the largest and most successful FOSS projects in the world, requires
only a promise that the contributor are able to license the code under GPL.
What are your reasons for the CLA proposal?
In the case of the node.js license, you are forced to grant Joyent inc
permission to license your work any way they see fit, including
proprietary.
This makes node.js project subject to the whim of Joyent's directors.
From a technical perspective, extracting a signature from everyone who has
ever contributed a patch to XWiki would be very difficult and there would
inevitably remain code within the codebase which was not transferred.
On the point of SF Conservancy and SPI, I would be guarded about
transferring a license to an organization until I knew the organization
(who runs it, what internal controls does it have) and had an assessment of
the dollar value of such a transfer. Just to pull out a number, the
codebase is probably worth somewhere in the 10's of millions of $.
Fortunately we're all pretty friendly in this community so a lot of the
darker what-if's just never come up but I think we should still remain
vigilant about new legal structures, especially if they involve putting
trust in people who none of us know.
Thanks,
Caleb
On 01/17/2013 05:19 AM, Vincent Massol wrote:
Hi devs,
I'd like to propose the following:
* That we start asking for a CLA for contributions (and also for current
committers)
* That we keep the process lightweight in order to not make it harder to
contribute to the xwiki project. For this I propose to use
http://www.clahub.com/
In order to understand why we need a CLA read:
* http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/cla
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement
If we agree we then need to define our CLA. I think a good starting
point could be the Node.js one:
http://nodejs.org/cla.html
Now I don't think the CLA will have any legal value if we cannot define
"the XWiki project" as a legal entity.
Thus I believe we need to start by joining some foundation or creating
one.
I'll list some easy possibilities:
* SF Conservancy: http://sfconservancy.org/members/current/
* SPI: http://www.spi-inc.org/projects/
* Create our own Not for profit association
Harder possibilities (need to change license, rename project, etc):
* Join ASF
* Join Eclipse (and be forced to use bugzilla as the issue tracker ;))
We also need to check if OW2 could offer that service of being a legal
entity for XWiki.
Personally I'm tempted more by our own association (it's quite easy to
create one if we don't need to accept money and a bit more complex if we
want to accept money but still doable). My second choice goes to SFC.
WDYT?
Thanks
-Vincent
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