Alan Burlison wrote:
> Rich Teer wrote:
>
>
>> As would I. The necessity to file a contributor agreement seems to imply
>> that the only contribution is by way of code. Why would someone contributes
>> by advocacy need to sign a contributor agreement?
>>
>
> Significant contributions in the form of documentation also require CAs,
> they aren't just restricted to code. From the Contributor Agreement:
>
> "1. The term 'contribution' means any source code, object code, patch,
> tool, sample, graphic, specification, manual, documentation, or any
> other material posted or submitted by you to a project."
>
There are also contributions that have been made without an SCA. In
particular, contributions that come with a license *other* than CDDL
(such as BSD licensed code, or possibly creative commons media
submissions) have such generous licensing terms that SCA isn't required.
There is at least one precedent for this. My own afe and mxfe drivers
were submitted without use of an SCA, but merely on the basis of the BSD
license. (Even though I have an SCA, which is apparently meaningless
now, now that I'm a Sun employee.)
The SCA itself is something intended to grant co-ownership of IP rights
to Sun. I'd rather not codify this particular relationship between
contributors and Sun in our constitution, if we can help it. Speaking
as a community member (rather than a Sun employee), it seems like it
should be perfectly reasonable to contribute code to OpenSolaris without
an SCA -- I don't think the "community" in particular gets any extra
value from the SCA -- all it does is give Sun the ability not to be
bound by the original CDDL on contributions. (This power can be used
for good or ill . A good example might be an upgrade to the license
language if CDDL were found to be legally indefensible. An obvious
example of ill would be if Sun decides to stop investing in OpenSolaris
and develop an exclusively closed-source version of Solaris -- note that
I don't think that this is particularly likely.) Therefore, Sun's
requirement for an SCA on file doesn't (IMO) necessarily translate well
to any intrinsic requirement from the community.
-- Garrett
