Thanks for the answers. But with regards to question #2: If I don't sign the SCA, then obviously I have no worries that anything that I post to opensolaris mailing lists will accidentally be considered to be a contribution under the SCA, even if I don't bother to say explicitly that my postings aren't contributions. But what happens if I sign the SCA so that I can make some particular contribution, and then later I make some more postings which I don't intend to be contributions? For example, if I sign the SCA, and then later while discussing some Solaris source code with a Sun-employed developer on a mailing list, I informally post a code patch with some proposed changes so that the Sun employee can comment on it, Sun could quite reasonably (under clause #1 of the SCA) consider the patch to be a contribution unless I bother to explicitly label it "Not a contribution". Even worse, if I happened to make such postings before signing the SCA, and omitted the "Not a contribution" notices from those messages because obviously such notices would have been irrelevant at the time, then after I sign the SCA those postings retroactively become susceptible (under clause #4 of the SCA) to being cooped by Sun as contributions.
Although the SCA as currently worded provides Sun the ability to do this, obviously Sun doesn't have any intention of actually doing it, since news that it had happened would be poorly received by the opensolaris community, to put it mildly. In fact it seems clear to me that Sun isn't even going to accept any posting as a contribution if there's any ambiguity about the poster's intent, even if he has already signed the SCA. Since that's the case, it seems that it would be better to simply remove the possibility of misunderstandings by changing the default, by modifying the SCA to specify that postings are not contributions unless explicitly designated as such, as I proposed. I can't think of any reason why the opposite default was chosen when the SCA was drafted, except that the drafters must have just overlooked this issue (though that would be odd, since surely at least one of them is a lawyer). Can you ask one of them for comment? This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
