Jean T. Anderson wrote: > 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? ... > 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.
>From a quick look, I spot several contributors who have not been nagged to file ICLAs, so there are probably more. I don't want to name names here because I don't want them to feel that their contributions were somehow not significant enough to merit being nagged to file an ICLA. We appreciate all contributions and anyone who wants to contribute to Derby (or any other ASF project) should feel free to go ahead and file an ICLA. Also, I don't know that Derby has a "policy" per se; committers have just noticed when something that looked like a "significant" contribution didn't have an ICLA. For example, committing the patch for DERBY-587 (JDBC 4.0 support) was held up until the ICLA was recorded. Hindsight is 20/20 and given the JDBC 4 licensing issues that affected the Derby 10.2 release, I'm glad Satheesh raised it as a commit issue: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/DERBY-587#action_12356249 . Should Derby have a formal policy? Or is evaluating contributions case by case sufficient? -jean
