Rick Hillegas wrote: > Last week at ApacheCon, I attended most of Cliff Schmidt's sessions on > intellectual property issues. Cliff is the ASF's vice president for > legal affairs. Cliff clarified that ICLAs are only needed for > committers. Similarly, a company's CLA only needs to cover its > committers. According to Cliff, we don't need ICLA/CLA coverage for > contributors who aren't committers. > > It seems to me that Derby's policy is stricter than this. As I recall, > we require ICLA/CLA coverage for all contributors, regardless of whether > they are committers. Why is Derby's policy stricter than general ASF > policy?
I knew I was going to regret flying out early and missing those final legal sessions. An FAQ on ICLAs is at http://db.apache.org/derby/faq.html#derby_icla . http://www.apache.org/licenses/ says in the section titled "Contributor License Agreements": "The ASF desires that all contributors of ideas, code, or documentation to the Apache projects complete, sign, and submit (via snailmail or fax) an Individual Contributor License Agreement (CLA) [PDF form]. The purpose of this agreement is to clearly define the terms under which intellectual property has been contributed to the ASF and thereby allow us to defend the project should there be a legal dispute regarding the software at some future time. A signed CLA is required to be on file before an individual is given commit rights to an ASF project." So, the stated policy is the ICLA is *desired* for contributors and *required* for committers. Apache projects decide what contribution is "big enough" to require an ICLA, and that bar varies quite a bit from one project to the next. I seem to recall that small Derby contributions have not been held up by lack of an ICLA. I'll look for an example of that if it's interesting. -jean
