Wichert Akkerman wrote:
On 7/29/09 7:51 AM, Jon Stahl wrote:
On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 12:07 AM, Geir Bækholt · Jarn<baekh...@jarn.com> wrote:
There is a step missing here: contributors must not only have signed the
agreement, they must explicitly allow that specific code to be donated to
the foundation. Signing the contributor agreement does not mean all your
code can be moved at will to the foundation.
Yes, of course. Implied but omitted. My bad. Thanks.
So, my question is: what qualifies as "explicit" agreement? Does it
have to be "on the permanent record" in some manner?
You'll have to ask the PF legal counsel I'm afraid. I don't know the
right answer.
I suspect you don't need to ask. :)
If all contributors of all lines of code that are being moved consent,
and have signed the contributor agreement, then there really is no issue.
We're now getting into a technical argument about what constitutes
"consent", but it's hardly that difficult. You ask. They say yes or no.
An email trail would be nice.
In reality, whenever we deal with these kinds of things, we operate
within some margin of acceptable risk. A risk always has a probability
of occurring and a probable impact if it does occur. The acceptability
of a risk depends on these two factors. Equally, there's a (usually more
measurable) cost and sometimes other risks associated with doing nothing.
So, in this case, we're deciding whether to move a product into the PF
repository.
There are risks and costs associated with not doing this, that is, the
usual risks to Plone associated with code not covered by the agreement.
There are risks associated with going ahead with the move, such as:
- Rob may lie about some contributor having consented
- Rob may misinterpret a particular response as consent
- Someone may indicate consent and then lie about it later, pretending
they didn't consent, and try to raise hell
- We may have it all wrong, and it may turn out there is some
convoluted legal procedure we *have* to follow, and if we don't, men in
expensive suits are going to come after us
The probability of any of those occurring I'd say is very low. The
impact would also likely be very low if any of these things did occur.
Most likely, the worst that would happen is that the PF board would need
to discuss it for a bit. In the worst case, we move the code back to the
Collective.
Let's try not to use the "we're not lawyers" argument as self-censorship
stop energy. The reality is that there's a big grey zone that we all
operate in every day, whether we are aware or not, and in reality the
spirit of the contributor agreement and the conservancy model matters
infinitely more than the technical details.
Furthermore, I suspect if you asked two lawyers, you'd get at least two
different answers.
Of course - I'm not a lawyer. But I do deal with these kinds of
questions quite often over commercial matters where there is a lot more
at stake than there is here, and a much higher probability of actual,
quantifiable losses if important steps are missed.
Martin
--
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who
want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book
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