On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 10:54 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
My recommendation is that you contact people who commit code to your extension, and request that they agree to license their contributions under a BSD-style license.
That would of course be the (please print out this form, sign it, scan it, then email me a copy) sure-fire way of contribution agreements. However if one hoped to make use of a service like the MW repo, this seems like too much of a hassle and like Rob mentioned, you're then better off just running your own show, elsewhere. And as you mention with translators it becomes near-impossible.
As I said before, I don't think a normal contributor agreement can be binding, because you don't control access to the repository. I also don't think your browse-wrap style contract will be binding on all contributors. In OTRS you wrote:
Agreed, like I mention above, short of getting a signed document, these things aren't legally binding, so the question of it's even worth having comes up pretty strongly. I've sent the question off to OSI license-discuss, I'm hoping they'll approve the message for discussion there so I can get some feedback on what more knowledgeable people think about BSD and contributions from outside sources. They may be able to say what we hope to hear "the BSD header is enough" or what I fear "you need signed contrib agreements" or some middle ground "here's some legal-lawyer speak that project X,Y,Z have used to mitigate this problem".
That's why I think that if you want to have a pure-BSD extension with solid legal footing, you should drop these headers from your source
I hope you don't mean the BSD license, and just meant the pseudo contributor agreement license-amendment I was toying with.
But in the end, my particular situation is just one of 3 that I mentioned could arise, with the other two being much more common. I don't want this discussion to just focus on my particular struggle with how to license my code, but on how MW might deal with more general non GPL-only code. Like say someone wanted to commit using the Microsoft OSI-approved license, or some non-gpl-compatible OSI license. And of course the case of GPL/propriatery dual-licensing arrangements.
Especially given how some people are doing some massive things with extensions (like SMW) I don't see it as unrealistic that this will come up, especially if building a healthy and strong extension developer continues on it's current track.