Daniel, would you be opposed to a CLA if the code were released under a more liberal license? For our open source code, Jane Street was advised to use a CLA, even though we were using a liberal license (Apache, in particular.) I'm curious if the CLA itself is a problem, or just the CLA in combination with a restrictive license?
y On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 2:34 PM Thomas Gazagnaire <tho...@gazagnaire.org> wrote: > Honestly, if we are speaking about re-licensing opam, I am really much in > favour of a more liberal license: MIT or BSD is so much simpler than > LGPL+CLA, and we don't really need to make the barrier for contributing > higher. > > Being there at the beginning, I understand the initial choice of license: > at the time, the scope of what was being building was not totally clear, > opam was the first large independent software project developed by OCamlPro > the company was very young and some kind of protection were needed. > Nowadays, I think opam is in a very different different situation: it > became the default package manager for OCaml. > > So I'd rather look at the next steps at how we can now make opam more > widespread. For instance, lower the contribution barrier: simpler and more > re-usable code, more documentation, simpler licensing scheme (BSD is the > new norm); and make it fully OCaml independent: in the source code but > also in the manual, and on its own website (generated from GH pages, with > manual + roadmap). Lastly, we need all which was discussed on the roadmap > for 1.3, including windows support :-) > > Best, > Thomas > > > Le lundi, 18 janvier 2016 à 19:09, Louis Gesbert a écrit : > >> By having a CLA in place, we ensure we have the hands free to avoid any > >> further such issues: the problem can't arise again. Yes, it does allow > us to > >> re-license the software, or even negociate specific licensing terms with > >> partners, which sounds quite fair to me. Also, this adds to the range of > >> theoretical possibilities, but we currently have no plans to monetize > Opam. > > > > So let's be honest about it. From the community point of view there are > very little incentives to this solution. License changes are rare. > > > >> I am curious and would be glad to hear more about it: I intuitively > don't see > >> much difference between submitting a contribution BSD-licensed or under > the > >> terms of the CLA, from the company's point of view. Am I wrong ? > > > > Yes. > > > > Opam is LGPL'ed, contributing under the terms of the CLA allows OCamlPro > to do whatever it wishes with opam and the contributions. But you as a > contributor are not allowed to do whatever you wish since you are bound by > LGPL terms. If Opam was under a more liberal license, everyone could do > whatever it wishes with the code and we'd no even need to have a discussion > about a CLA. > > > > Also from a broader perspective, companies may have rules that say you > are allowed to contribute to projects that have these specific kind of > licenses. Having other legalities under the form of CLAs surrounding > contribution may be a no go because the legal setting is non standard or > would need to much legal investigations. > > > > Best, > > > > Daniel > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > opam-devel mailing list > > opam-devel@lists.ocaml.org > > http://lists.ocaml.org/listinfo/opam-devel > > _______________________________________________ > opam-devel mailing list > opam-devel@lists.ocaml.org > http://lists.ocaml.org/listinfo/opam-devel >
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