Hi Vincent, The only reason I see for a CLA is to allow the organization to relicense the code under a different license. Being difficult to re-license makes the project more stable and I don't see any major problems with the LGPL.
The idea that "every project needs a CLA" which seems to be implied by oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/cla is easily dispelled by the fact that Linux, one of the largest and most successful FOSS projects in the world, requires only a promise that the contributor are able to license the code under GPL. What are your reasons for the CLA proposal? In the case of the node.js license, you are forced to grant Joyent inc permission to license your work any way they see fit, including proprietary. This makes node.js project subject to the whim of Joyent's directors. >From a technical perspective, extracting a signature from everyone who has ever contributed a patch to XWiki would be very difficult and there would inevitably remain code within the codebase which was not transferred. On the point of SF Conservancy and SPI, I would be guarded about transferring a license to an organization until I knew the organization (who runs it, what internal controls does it have) and had an assessment of the dollar value of such a transfer. Just to pull out a number, the codebase is probably worth somewhere in the 10's of millions of $. Fortunately we're all pretty friendly in this community so a lot of the darker what-if's just never come up but I think we should still remain vigilant about new legal structures, especially if they involve putting trust in people who none of us know. Thanks, Caleb On 01/17/2013 05:19 AM, Vincent Massol wrote: > Hi devs, > > I'd like to propose the following: > * That we start asking for a CLA for contributions (and also for current > committers) > * That we keep the process lightweight in order to not make it harder to > contribute to the xwiki project. For this I propose to use > http://www.clahub.com/ > > In order to understand why we need a CLA read: > * http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/cla > * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement > > If we agree we then need to define our CLA. I think a good starting point > could be the Node.js one: > http://nodejs.org/cla.html > > Now I don't think the CLA will have any legal value if we cannot define "the > XWiki project" as a legal entity. > > Thus I believe we need to start by joining some foundation or creating one. > > I'll list some easy possibilities: > * SF Conservancy: http://sfconservancy.org/members/current/ > * SPI: http://www.spi-inc.org/projects/ > * Create our own Not for profit association > > Harder possibilities (need to change license, rename project, etc): > * Join ASF > * Join Eclipse (and be forced to use bugzilla as the issue tracker ;)) > > We also need to check if OW2 could offer that service of being a legal entity > for XWiki. > > Personally I'm tempted more by our own association (it's quite easy to create > one if we don't need to accept money and a bit more complex if we want to > accept money but still doable). My second choice goes to SFC. > > WDYT? > > Thanks > -Vincent > > _______________________________________________ > devs mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs > _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
