[OSGeo-Board] Contributor agreements

[Frank Warmerdam]

Dave McIlhagga wrote:
> One further thought:
> 
> Is the primary concern about adoption of the CLA revolve around granting 
> the right to re-license to the Foundation -- in particular for GPL 
> projects?
> 
> If this is the main issue - has there been any consideration of allowing 
> each project to select from one of two CLAs, one that grants the ability 
> to re-license and one that does not?

Dave,

There were several factors in play.  I tried proposing we alter the CLA to
remove the option to relicense but some people felt this removed the only
real concrete benefit of the CLA.

While there is little doubt in my mind that we need to offer a CLA without
the relicensing option if we are going to have a CLA, for me the most
compelling argument against the CLA is the amount of overhead it introduces
for a (to my mind) questionable legal benefit.  Eric and Daniel have both
been in the position of "enforcer" trying to collect similar signed
agreements to the CLA and they indicated it was alot of work and hassle.  It
often delayed contributions for months, and many contributors just never
completed them resulting in lost contributions (and contributors).

I think the terms of the agreement are quite reasonable (with the possible
exception of the relicensing option) but when I imagine myself going to
some of my corporate contributors, I can imagine it being very hard to get
the agreement signed.  Even Rich felt that many corporate legal departments
would be unlikely to authorize signing of such an agreement for relatively
casual involvement in open source projects unless there was a very concrete
reason for the corporation to take on the legal risk of signing such an
agreement.

To me, the need for a stricter regime of code provenance review is very
important as part of making GDAL/OGR acceptable to corporate users.  I have
already had significant concerns about GDAL/OGR raised by SDK consumers such
as Oracle, ESRI and Microsoft.  One of the reasons I am keen on the foundation
is to give my project greater credibility.  This includes improved IP clarity.
I think this will also be important to many of the other projects.  I can
definitely see it's value for MapServer, or for SDKs like GeoTools.

However, at this point I'm not sure the CLA adds much real concrete value.
I think a variety of other stricter controls enforced at the committer level,
and reviewed at the project and foundation level are the way to go.  They
can provide real benefits and make us as a foundation able to give a 'stamp
of approval' to the code and other resources we provide.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGF, http://osgeo.org