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in defense of "contributor agreements" or whatever they are called nowadaysin defense of "contributor agreements" or whatever they are called nowadaysPosted Apr 13, 2011 17:26 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)In reply to: in defense of "contributor agreements" or whatever they are called nowadays by jspaleta Parent article: Project Harmony decloaks
"I think it weakens the argument you are making to include them as examples, unless you can point to some sort of previous discussion in the context of upstart development where good-faith contributions from contributors were turned aside by the assignment policy requirement. I'm not aware of that ever happening."
Technical design might be the more important reason for systemd but it is clear that copyright assignment requirements played a role and while what you have suggested is one way to look for the impact, I think it is far from the only way. For instance, the questions one can ask include, how many developers were turned away from ever submitting patches because of the requirement? Among the active systemd developers, which ones felt more motivated to systemd because it explicitly advertised the fact that no copyright assigned is required? Did it influence adoption by distributions? and so on. I don't purport to know the answers to these questions but I disagree that it is not a valid example although it might not be as big a instance as Openoffice.org vs Libreoffice.
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in defense of "contributor agreements" or whatever they are called nowadays Posted Apr 13, 2011 17:34 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
"What ifs" when it comes to trying to estimate the number of people who refused to engage because of assignment is difficult to use effectively as a rhetorical tool. We don't have a reliable measure or even estimate on that. From a strategic messaging standpoint I shun making that particular argument unless I can find at least one example of a specific contribution submitted in good faith which was turned away because an assignment wasn't agreed to. I have such historic examples for other codebases that require assignment. I don't have one handy for upstart.
-jef
in defense of "contributor agreements" or whatever they are called nowadays Posted Apr 13, 2011 18:07 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
My goal is not rhetoric or strategic messaging or whatever. I can reliably point out that when systemd was launched, the first blog post describing the project pointed out the lack of copyright assignment as a advantage when comparing itself to upstart and it is clear that developers involved view it as such. No doubt about that and that by itself establishes the negative impact.
Whether patches submitted to a project were rejected on the basis of such a requirement is not a very interesting way to measure the impact as far as I am concerned because anyone who looks at contributing to a project and realizes there is a requirement to assign copyright would just not bother submitting any patches in the first place. If you are interested enough, you can talk to the developers involved and find out more. I have but there is no public reference for you so you will have to do the leg work yourself to find out more.
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