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TheGoddessInari / hamsket

Free and Open Source messaging and emailing app that combines common web applications into one.
GNU General Public License v3.0
881 stars 54 forks source link

Suggestion: Contributor License Agreement #52

Open AlvaroBrey opened 6 years ago

AlvaroBrey commented 6 years ago

Hi. Since this repo is going to do open source the right way, it would be cool to have a Contributor License Agreement.

In my org we use clahub.com, which integrates with GitHub and checks that submitters of PRs have accepted the CLA. Here's one example of a CLA. It could be modified to explicitly say that contributions are done under the GPLv3 license.

TheGoddessInari commented 6 years ago

Would maintaining CLAs more or less make it 'more difficult' to accept upstream commits assuming they're relevant, and assuming upstream doesn't do same? Which is to say, would it not be as useful in that case?

AlvaroBrey commented 6 years ago

Well, I've never been in that situation, but as I see it, CLA only applies to contributors to this repo.

By my understanding, contributions to GPLv3 software are treated as GPLv3, though the contributor retains copyright, i.e. the maintainer would not be able to redistribute the contributions under another license. As such, you could incorporate GPLv3 upstream contributions as long as your version remains GPLv3.