On Thu, Oct 27, 2016 at 8:08 PM, Daniel Campbell <z...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > With a DCO, it greatly complicates things. Would my right to keep my > contributions in an overlay be infringed upon? What would change if we > switch to this? >
The DCO doesn't change your rights at all, or change the status of the copyright. It is simply a declaration that the code is redistributable under the appropriate license. While we don't have a DCO in place currently, it is already policy that devs are supposed to check the license. The FLA does change the status of the copyright/licensing situation. However, this will be voluntary, so if it concerns anybody they simply can choose to sign it. However, under the FLA if you do assign copyright to Gentoo then in accordance with the agreement Gentoo will give you the right to redistribute your code in perpetuity without restriction (if I'm reading it correctly). Essentially you'd be giving Gentoo the right to re-license the code under another FOSS license or pursue copyright claims, but you still will be able to do most of the things you could do if you had retained copyright. Both practices are actually very standard in the FOSS world. The DCO is used by Linux and numerous other projects and is generally considered a best practice for any project. The FLA is less commonly used, but I know that KDE uses it. It is probably more common in community products especially in Europe, since it is designed to handle the German case. I'd say that a CLA is a more common practice, especially in projects that are dual-licensed with a commercial backer. The CLA is a much stronger transfer of the rights of the contributor to the project and usually gives the project a blank check to do whatever they want with the code, such as making it exclusively closed-source in the future. This is obviously desirable to corporate-backed projects as it gives them more options to extract money from the code. The DCO basically is an extra assurance that our copyrights are sound. The FLA is a way to give Gentoo more options for relicensing code and such, but in a way that is more compatible with our social contract and which probably also makes us a less attractive hostile takeover target (since the FLA would limit the sorts of bad things somebody could do with our copyrights if they managed to seize them). Honestly, I think the policy actually does simplify things for the most part by making a lot of things explicit where currently they are vague and where a variety of opinions prevail. However, simplification was never really the main goal of the policy. It is more about not getting sued and being more flexible the next time somebody decides to fork something like udev without starting a fiasco. Since she hasn't promoted it herself, I'll point out that alicef has wikified the policy here: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Aliceinwire/CopyrightPolicy I'll go ahead and make some of the tweaks mentioned in the thread, and maybe try to improve the attribution overhead which I think is the only real downside. I think if it were implemented the contents of that page would probably be split up a bit as it combines very static information (the policy) with things like the table of licenses which obviously will be updated frequently. -- Rich
