On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 10:35 PM, Ken Wesson <kwess...@gmail.com> wrote: > Perhaps. But it's well known that any barrier to participation causes > a percentage drop in same.
This topic keeps coming up, and while a large number of people have signed CAs (many of us at the conference last year), people keep citing it as some unique requirement foisted upon the community by a power hungry dictator -- or something like that. The truth of the matter is that different "open source" projects maintain differing levels of IP stewardship. Some are quite lax, and some are quite strict. Often, the older the project, and the "higher profile" it is, the more likely it is to maintain some level of IP control. That many project don't do this is not a sign of crowd-wisdom. For example, the following projects REQUIRE contributor agreements, in writing, signed and either scanned or on paper, prior to accepting any patches or commits: - Free Software Foundation - Apache, and everything under it - Python - Perl - Django - MySQL - Node.js - Fedora Linux - Neo4j - Sun (now Oracle) That was a combination of the ones I have on record that I've signed over the years, and the result of a few seconds searching. I don't think most of those have found much trouble in flourishing as a true open source community. Now, I'm not passing judgement on whether these are "good for community", but as someone who has had to deal with the legal ramifications of tainted IP, I can tell you it's something that you do not want to have to deal with. It is expensive, and the only people that win are the lawyers. If you want to see a community destroyed, drag it into the legal system for a good thrashing. Do you want to explain to a judge who doesn't know how to use email that your pull-request was the same? Trust me, you don't. Especially when your opponent often has 10-10,000x the financial resources. The legal system in the United States, where Clojure is covered, has moved very slowly and in very mixed ways around click-thru, shrink-wrap and other license/agreement styles that do not require an explicit signature. It may be a sad state of the system, but it is the state of the system none-the-less. Even "electronic signatures" exist in a fragmented and rather poorly understood legal area unless it involves cryptographic keys that can be traced back. Being cautious, when it comes to intellectual property protection, is simply being wise. Yes, it diffuses a small amount of "pain" now, but in exchange for the elimination of a lot of risk later. Now, someone could provide a way to have them faxed, or scanned and emailed, rather than paper, and that might reduce the "pain" a little, but the reality is, your John Hancock is worth more in a court of law than any 500 check boxes on a form. Legal agreements, such as these, transfer liability. If Rich, or whomever, were to accept a contribution via a pull-request, without having an accompanying document he can point to that says "I am the sole owner of this intellectual property", it would be possible to contaminate the entire code base. I know it sounds paranoid, but when distilled, that's what the legal system is ... structured paranoia. Chris -- | Chris Petrilli | petri...@amber.org -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
