On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 10:54 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)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.