[PROJ] OSGeo incubation status - CLA

[Cameron Shorter]

I agree with Bas. I've been researching best practices into Open Source 
licenses of late, and I'm now against CLAs. Further reason for proj:

* If at least one of your contributors won't sign the CLA, then you 
won't be able to retrospectively collect all ownership rights and 
allocate them to an entity (such as OSGeo). Thanks Bas for stating that 
you would be one of those people and forcing the issue.

--

While I think the "do nothing" approach for proj would be best, you 
might want to consider adding a statement along the lines of:

"If you contribute to Proj, we assume you do so under the terms of the 
Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO): 
https://developercertificate.org/" <https://developercertificate.org/>

The DCO is typically implemented with each contributor signing their 
commit message, however, a statement above could be used instead (I 
don't have legal advice on whether this is acceptable).

It also doesn't address retrospectively applying this.

Cheers, Cameron

On 10/9/19 5:21 am, Sebastiaan Couwenberg wrote:
> Don't introduce a CLA, that just raises the barrier to entry unnecessarily.
>
> I personally refuse to sign them and opt to stop contributing to the
> project in question.
>
> This is quite a good summary of the situation:
>
>   https://ben.balter.com/2018/01/02/why-you-probably-shouldnt-add-a-cla-to-your-open-source-project/

-- 
Cameron Shorter
Technology Demystifier
Open Technologies and Geospatial Consultant

M +61 (0) 419 142 254

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