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Re: CLAs for patch contributors? (was: Re: question on headers)

From: Hyrum K. Wright <hyrum_at_hyrumwright.org>
Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 07:53:34 -0500

On Jul 7, 2009, at 6:59 AM, Stefan Sperling wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 07, 2009 at 03:17:41PM +0800, Edmund Wong wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> http://subversion.org/legal/individual-cla.html
>>>>> http://subversion.org/legal/corporate-cla.txt
>>>> Does this also apply to patches?
>>>
>>> I'm not a lawyer, but my sense is that any patch over N lines would
>>> require this, where N is probably a small number like 5.
>>>
>>
>> I would've thought that with an Open Source project such as
>> SVN, the contributions would by default belong to the project
>> and no one else? Or am I confusing this with some other
>> license/theory?
>
> I guess that, in theory, any license sitting beyond a BSD-like one
> on the "I don't care" scale will require some amount of paperwork.
>
> But I don't think we require CLAs from patch contributors.
> We require CLAs from committers, which as far as I understand is
> similar to what the ASF (Apache Software Foundation) and the FSF
> (Free Software Foundation) are doing, more or less.

We *haven't* requires CLAs from patch contributors in the past, but
encouraging patch contributor to sign now would be a Good Thing,
IMHO. The FSF and ASF both request (require?) contributors of "non-
trivial" patches to sign CLAs before accepting them, even in that
individual is not a committer. By having patch contributors sign CLAs
up front, we can eliminate potential "gotchas" for both the
contributor and the Corp down the road.

(No, we don't have a hard and fast policy on this yet, and I'm sure
we'll debate it ad nauseam before we do, but that shouldn't stop
Edmund from executing a CLA in the meantime :)

> ...

-Hyrum

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Received on 2009-07-07 14:54:05 CEST

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