On 06/01/2011 03:45 PM, Mark Wielaard wrote: > On Wed, 2011-06-01 at 16:38 +0200, Mark Wielaard wrote: >> On Wed, 2011-06-01 at 15:34 +0100, Andrew Haley wrote: >>> On 06/01/2011 11:10 AM, Mark Wielaard wrote: >>>> gb-members can no longer be just participants, but need to be >>>> contributors. Contributors are in this draft still defined as being >>>> those who assign all their rights to Oracle. Does Oracle really need >>>> the rights to re-license the gb-board minutes to other companies so >>>> they can make closed and proprietary derivatives of the documented >>>> processes of the community? >>> >>> I'm not sure I really understand this objection. Surely you can't be >>> an OpenJDK contributor unless you have signed the OCA. So, the only >>> way that you could be a member of the governing board and not have >>> signed the OCA would be to be a non-participant: someone who does not >>> work on OpenJDK. Do we actually want people who don't work on OpenJDK >>> on the GB? >> >> There are "Participants", who work on OpenJDK that don't have signed the >> OCA. That is just how the Bylaws define them. > > Actually, I think that is too short an explanation of the objection. > Let me try again :) > > There are lots of roles, like being a bug master, running the build > servers, being a board member, documenter, etc. that don't involve > explicit code contributions. But who are still participants in a project > with a vested interest in it. In general, I would like to minimize the > usage of the OCA because I think it is overly broad and doesn't > encourage participation. It doesn't make sense to me to force everybody > who wants to participate in any kind of non-code role to hand over all > their rights to Oracle, just to participate in the project.
OK, so this is really an objection to the OCA per se: it assumes that the OCA is in general, a Bad Thing, so anything that can be done to reduce its use is, by definition, a Good Thing. But this doesn't make any sense. If you do not contribute any code to the project then it does not matter at all whether you have signed the OCA. No code has changed hands, so you have not given away any rights to that nonexistent code. Andrew.
