So, 2 questions for the community would be,
1) would you find a contributor agreement tenable (and what would
make
it not tenable for either you or your employer)
I think the key issue, as others have said, is what is contained
within the contributor agreement.
If the agreement just contains a statement that you are entitled to
release the code you are contributing, and similar language (see, for
example, the Mozilla CLA) then I can't see it being a real problem.
In my opinion, the issues arrive if the contributor license is
structured to allow the Foundation to perform any kind of
relicensing. This requires contributors to place a significant level
of trust in the Foundation, now and in the future, to only relicense
code in a manner which is acceptable to the community. In particular,
there is the danger that the Foundation could sell code which has
been contributed to it in this way to commercial third parties,
without the permission of the original contributors. I'm sure nobody
involved in the Foundation has any intention of this at present, but
it is a concern for the future.
So, any contribution agreement that requires assignment of copyright,
or which grants the Foundation additional permissions over and above
the license that the contribution is provided under, would have to be
very carefully considered. I feel that even a well structured
agreement along these lines might deter prospective contributors, who
either want to retain the ability to determine how their code may be
used, or whose employers aren't prepared to grant extensive
relicensing permissions to a third party.
2) would having all members of the foundation sign one as a condition
of membership (where "sign" may not necessarily involve paper or
physical copies, if that can be made to work) be an issue?
Providing the contributor agreement itself is acceptable, I don't
think there would be any issue with requiring agreement to it as a
condition of foundation membership. It's not currently clear to me
what relationship there is between foundation membership and code
contribution. Obviously, you would want all contributors to agree to
the contributor agreement - but would all contributors be required to
join the foundation?
Cheers,
Simon.
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