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?
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
Thanks, Jean, I think that clears it up. No need to do further
archaeology here. I'm happy to leave the definition of "small" to the
good sense of our committers.
Regards,
-Rick
