2008/6/19 Simon Phipps <webmink at sun.com>: > > On Jun 19, 2008, at 21:01, Garrett D'Amore wrote: > >> Too late. There is already a ton of useful code that is in Solaris >> that >> is not covered under SCA or CDDL, and has no such guarantees. For >> example, pretty much all of the desktop environment (X11, Gnome, >> Mozilla), significant portions of the infrastructure (Apache, OpenSSL, >> Sendmail), etc. > > Just because someone in the past has had to go to a lot of trouble to > assess risk in cases like these it doesn't mean that in future we > should ignore the ability to minimise the risks that come, for > example, from contributor patents.
As an external contributor, and someone that has signed the SCA, I hope that it continues to be required for the majority of contributions wherever reasonable. I believe that the Sun's due diligence in this area will be of great benefit long-term. In my view, this will likely be proven correct as other projects flounder in the future to make important legal-related decisions for their project and are unable to do so as a result of their lack of due diligence. The biggest impediment to contribution is not the SCA -- it is the time and effort required for trivial contributions. I would strongly encourage that efforts remains focused on those areas and that the SCA remains an important part of the contribution process where reasonable. What few objections I've heard to the SCA would be solved by a foundation or an agreement similar to what Trolltech has with the KDE foundation for Qt. -- Shawn Walker
