[TOS] contributors' agreements
Behdad Esfahbod
behdad at behdad.org
Wed Dec 9 20:51:49 UTC 2009
On 12/09/2009 03:41 PM, Ross Gardler wrote:
> The Indivdiaul Contributor License Agreement
> (http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt) says:
>
> 6. You are not expected to provide support for Your Contributions,
> except to the extent You desire to provide support. You may provide
> support for free, for a fee, or not at all. Unless required by
> applicable law or agreed to in writing, You provide Your
> Contributions on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS
> OF ANY KIND, either express or implied, including, without
> limitation, any warranties or conditions of TITLE, NON-
> INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY, or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
>
> Without a CLA, there is no such agreement between the original
> contributor and the project. The project itself could sue the
> contributor for a bug that resulted in damages. Having a CLA between
> the contributor and the ASF makes it clear that the contributor offers
> no warranty for his code. Thus the contributor has more protection by
> using a CLA than by not using a CLA.
>
> Of course, *your* project will never sue a contributor, right? How do
> you guarantee that without an explicit agreement? How do you guarantee
> that this will always be the case?
>
> I realise that the alternative view of "code is contributed under
> license XYZ and XYZ has such a disclaimer" is arguably sufficient.
Indeed. If you think CLA for contribution is a good idea, then why not ask
any user of the software also sign a CLA?
My point is, if the license is good enough for protecting the project from
consumers, it ought to be good enough for protecting contributors from the
project.
> However, any lawyer will tell you that an explicit agreement is far
> more likely to stand up against scrutiny than an implicit agreement.
Sure, lawyers are good at covering their own a** at the expense of troubling
others. (no offense to our friendly lawyers at SFLC of course, who are always
helpful and have never caused us at GNOME any trouble, quite the contrary.
I'm thinking about the widespread corporate law culture here.)
> A further protection for contributors is that the CLA is an explicit
> agreement which essentially says "I will not sue you for using my
> code". If every contributor needs to sign a CLA then no contributor
> can sue the project or any other contributor. But, as above, if there
> is no explicit agreement of this sort we are exposing contributors to
> risk, it's even worse when some people have signed and others have not
> since there is unequal risk across the project (and those who worry
> about these things would claim the drive by contributor is more likely
> to abuse this).
Other than what I already pointed out, it also seems like you are trying to
solve a problem that does not exist. Unless you can point out to a single
case in the 20/30 year history of Free Software where someone sued someone
else which could be prevented by having had a CLA, I'm not buying into it.
If no-CLA has worked for Mozilla, GNOME, KDE, and Linux, I wouldn't bother for
any other project of mine.
behdad
> Ross
>
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