On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 3:08 PM, Greg Wilson <gvwil...@cs.utoronto.ca> wrote: > Regardless of whether the FLOSS organization requires a contributor's > agreement, is it wise to get one so that the student's university doesn't > think they have any rights to what the students has done?
My personal opinions (not an official Mozilla position): As Ross wrote, it's ultimately a risk management issue, and part of that means trading off less risk vs. more hassle, and vice versa. For example, if a university has a particularly large and active office of technology transfer and a more-than-usual interest in making relatively-expansive IP claims in relation to faculty and student work, the amount of work required to get an explicit waiver or grant of rights (i.e., in the form of a CLA) may be onerous enough to strangle any TOS-related initiative in the cradle. Expanding on my earlier comments in relation to Mozilla: In the Mozilla project almost all the code is generated by Mozilla employees (under a work for hire situation, with assignment to the Mozilla Foundation), carried over from Netscape (explicit grant of rights), or contributed by major corporations like IBM, Sun, Red Hat, etc. (explicit grant of rights, though not in the form of a CLA per se). The amount of code contributed by individual volunteers, including students, is pretty small in relative terms; ditto for code contributed by small businesses. With respect to individual contributors, including students, Mozilla has chosen to prioritize ease of making contributions over reducing IP-related risks to the absolute minimum, with contributors informally affirming that they have rights to contribute their code, and committers informally verifying this. It's certainly possible that some code has slipped in at one time or another for which the contributor did not actually have rights to contribute under the Mozilla licensing scheme. If that were the case, it's also possible that the organization that does have rights would object to the contribution and seek to exert its own claims, e.g., by preventing the code from being used by the Mozilla project. However in practice that's never happened, and Mozilla has made a decision to accept any associated risk as opposed to trying to further formalize the act of contributing code. I suspect that many other FOSS projects have made a similar risk management trade-off. Frank -- Frank Hecker _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
