Bill Sommerfeld wrote:
On Wed, 2009-10-28 at 10:49 -0700, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
They may not require it, but some do allow it - for instance, the NetBSD
Foundation last year changed the license on all the code which contributors
had donated the copyright to them. (Dropping one of the previous BSD
license clauses.)
Other examples of why a contributor agreement is important:
Anyone who follows Freenode's #mercurial channel knows that they're
going through a relicensing exercise at the moment, attempting to
contact developers who contributed code. They say they're up to "96%"
at this point but it's an extended exercise. In many cases all they
have for the contributor is a name and an email address which no longer
works.
Additionally, if a contributor has died (it happens!) it may prove to be
difficult to find someone who represents the estate to agree to a
proposed change.
An appropriately structured contributor agreement protects the entire
community and prevents it from having to discard contributions when
contributors wander off.
- Bill
This is required when the original license imposes requirements that
might be burdensome. A low overhead BSD license has no such problem.
Especially a two-clause or more permissive style license.
There are potential drawbacks to this approach as well.. you have to
trust that the organization you're sharing the ownership with is not
going to turn "evil".
Some contributors might not like, for example, that under the existing
SCA, Sun can make derivative commercial products without ever supplying
source code which the CDDL would require anyone else to do. (Of course,
this is also allowed under any kind of BSD license.)
For example, if you really oppose the GPLv3 for some reason, and
contributed code under CDDL, you might be really dismayed if Sun
suddenly re-released your code under a GPLv3 license.
Conversely, if you *love* GPL, and gave your code to FSF, but FSF were
acquired somehow by a company with commercial interests, you might be
really really upset to see your code suddenly start getting licensed out
for commercial concerns without any of the GPL provisions.
Anyway, the license debate isn't that interesting to me. I don't care
if we require an SCA or not, personally. I was just looking at this
as another barrier to entry that *could* have been removed.
- Garrett
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