Fedora project switching to new contributor agreement [LWN.net]

Fedora project switching to new contributor agreement

Posted May 18, 2011 23:53 UTC (Wed) by jg (subscriber, #17537)
In reply to: Fedora project switching to new contributor agreement by jspaleta
Parent article: Fedora project switching to new contributor agreement

For me to recommend any such agreement a) is against my beliefs; b) if I were to want to recommend such an agreement in such cases where someone believes it must exist (which I do not), I'd have to read it carefully and think, which would cause me to become cross-eyed for a few days ;-), as happens anytime I have to read an agreement.

For God's sake, let's not have contributor agreement proliferation to go with license proliferation.

Note that in the history of the old X Consortium, we had a different solution that required no acceptance of an explicit set of terms and conditions of an agreement such as these or other contributor agreements; significant contributions were accompanied by a letter that asserted that the person providing the contribution was authorized/able to do so and that the person doing the submission understood that the software was indeed going to be distributed under the terms of their license or that of other copyright licenses present in their code.

Similar letters accompanied contributions to the Berkeley Software Distribution: I have, for example, in my possession a copy of the letter that accompanied the original X distribution that went onto 4.3BSD.

These letters were one hell of a lot shorter and easier to understand, and I think provides the same kind of thing RH and other corporations care about: that contributions come from people able to make the contribution in the first place, and not some rogue employee unauthorized to do so.

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Fedora project switching to new contributor agreement

Posted May 19, 2011 14:57 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

Note that in the history of the old X Consortium, we had a different solution that required no acceptance of an explicit set of terms and conditions of an agreement such as these or other contributor agreements; significant contributions were accompanied by a letter that asserted that the person providing the contribution was authorized/able to do so and that the person doing the submission understood that the software was indeed going to be distributed under the terms of their license or that of other copyright licenses present in their code.

I think this is more or less the case for organisations like the Python Software Foundation: there's something you sign which says that "this is my work and I am allowed to release it" and that you are offering it under a selection of licences. One has to wonder why this kind of thing isn't good enough for other organisations.

I think there's a vested interest for some people to claim that such declarations somehow aren't good enough, leading down the slippery slope (seen elsewhere recently) that ends with a sentiment like, "To be on the safe side and to safeguard the future of the project, we should really own all the code." The worrying thing is that newcomers and people not versed in licensing issues think that this is the way things should be, or are normally, done.