I find it doubtful that every single contribution (including those to the wiki) really needs to have a CLA. If that were true, many more organizations would force contributors to sign said document. Yet I'm able to contribute to Mozilla, Wikipedia, etc. without signing a overly legal document.
Furthermore, its not simply the legal requirements which are worrisome — its their simple choice of infrastructure. From looking at project pages and investigating the technology available, they seem to be using the most backward systems possible. From a requirement of using a static site to forcing substandard bug trackers on us, it doesn't look very encouraging for a supposedly forward-thinking community. On Apr 23, 2009, at 11:21 AM, Geoffrey Sneddon wrote: > > > On 23 Apr 2009, at 13:39, Owen Winkler wrote: > >> Geoffrey Sneddon wrote: >>> >>> On 23 Apr 2009, at 01:12, Owen Winkler wrote: >>> >>>> Modeling our own project on the ASF wouldn't have made sense if we >>>> did >>>> not agree with how it operates. Yet in the areas of >>>> infrastructure, >>>> user-contributed repositories, branding, and community-building - >>>> things >>>> that are important to keeping our community open - the ASF either >>>> doesn't provide what I think Habari needs or is more restrictive >>>> than >>>> the code of behavior under which Habari has so far flourished. >>>> That >>>> reason alone is enough for me to discount applying. >>> >>> A lot of the requirements that Apache places upon such things are >>> needed if you ever want to have any decent legal framework. There >>> needs to be clear transfer of copyright from the contributor to the >>> project, and that has to apply for the docs as well if we want free >>> documentation that can be safely distributed. It's hard to have a >>> fully open community while having a legal framework in place. >> >> My issue in that regard has to do with discounting user contributions >> because those users have not agreed in writing to publish their code >> under the project's license. I encourage the use of those legal >> requirements, but I think segmenting the community between "PMC stuff >> where the PMC agreed to these terms" and "non-PMC stuff we don't >> seem to >> care about" is the wrong way to handle it, rather than enforcing >> those >> restrictions for all users across all Habari resources. > > There's nothing stopping them from contributing provided they have > signed a CLA. We are never going to get the legal protection that > requires this unless we do this, which sucks (actually, you can in a > few countries, like Scotland, which have legally binding verbal > contracts, but they are few and far between). > > > -- > Geoffrey Sneddon > <http://gsnedders.com/> > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/habari-dev -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
