in defense of "contributor agreements" or whatever they are called nowadays

Posted Apr 13, 2011 18:40 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
In reply to: in defense of "contributor agreements" or whatever they are called nowadays by zooko
Parent article: Project Harmony decloaks

I remember discussing the strategies for copyright assignment for this project with you right here in LWN which is a public forum and if you haven't mentioned such a requirement in the developer oriented documentation, you should and do so prominently. I would consider it cheating and would be deeply disappointed if I spend time and effort writing a patch for a project only for the maintainers to let me know after the fact, that need me to sign over a legal agreement that grants them rights to use the code however they please before accepting my patch.

in defense of "contributor agreements" or whatever they are called nowadays

Posted Apr 13, 2011 20:08 UTC (Wed) by zooko (guest, #2589) [Link] (3 responses)

It's not so much a "requirement" as a polite request. Two people politely declined, around a dozen or so (including all of the most prolific and valuable contributors) readily agreed. I don't want to complicate the developer documentation and distract people from writing code by adding that fact to the developer documentation.

Which, I suppose, definitely proves one of the points against such contributor agreements. Perhaps I should reconsider and add a mention about that to the developer docs.

in defense of "contributor agreements" or whatever they are called nowadays

Posted Apr 13, 2011 21:01 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

Requests are entirely different than a codified requirement.

I think its entirely ethical for a central authority, even a for-profit one, to make that sort of request as long as they contributor really does have the ability to say no. As long as the incorporation of contribution in question is not held up because of a lack of requested assignment, then I don't see a problem with.

I have no problem with contributors choosing to gift their copyrights as long as its a gift freely given with no explicit or implicit strings attached with regard to their standing as a contributor or the incorporation of their submitted work.

-jef

in defense of "contributor agreements" or whatever they are called nowadays

Posted Apr 14, 2011 5:02 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

"It's not so much a "requirement" as a polite request."

Unless you would accept a patch without the contributor signing the legal agreement, I would say it is still a requirement albeit a politely worded one. There is nothing inherently wrong with requirements as long as they are explicit.

in defense of "contributor agreements" or whatever they are called nowadays

Posted Apr 14, 2011 14:54 UTC (Thu) by zooko (guest, #2589) [Link]

Actually we *did* accept patches to add-on modules without this grant of rights. I don't actually *know* if we would similarly accept patches to the core without that grant of rights. Maybe somebody reading this should test my resolve by writing some really awesome patches and then offering to support them in Tahoe-LAFS but not to grant us all the rights. :-)