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dat-ecosystem-archive / datproject-discussions

a repo for discussions and other non-code organizing stuff [ DEPRECATED - More info on active projects and modules at https://dat-ecosystem.org/ ]
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CLAs + Licensing #2

Open jbenet opened 10 years ago

jbenet commented 10 years ago

Discuss 9b459ba

max-mapper commented 10 years ago

we should allow the apache license also

lancejpollard commented 10 years ago

Just for reference what are the intentions behind these?

Most of the collaborators could be extracted from the git commits, but i guess that would support people that haven't formally contributed to the repo but gave advice and such? It would also be cool to have command line plugins or whatever that could handle things like this, updating the contributors file from the git commits and such.

lancejpollard commented 10 years ago

And I'm guessing the CLA is mainly so that if you use anything related to dat, then the company you work for can't sue dat. Basically, if you contribute to dat at all, and you work for a company that sues people, then there is a risk that the company can sue dat (likely wouldn't win but it would waste lots of time and money), because of your employment agreement with that company.

The CLA just is a legal precaution against that, anything else? Why is that not an issue for any open source project with contributors? It seems like this is something github should force everyone to do automatically.

max-mapper commented 10 years ago

yep that's it. from what I understand (I am not a lawyer) theoretically every project should have a CLA but most projects are small so they don't ever hit these legal scenarios

jbenet commented 10 years ago

@lancejpollard Also, it's common to see projects "CLA-up" after they get big, and then it's a huge pain for everyone to go back and get every single contributor's agreement retroactively. For an example of what fun it is to retroactively fix legal things --in this case switching licenses--, see http://goo.gl/Jh0NTD (shortened to avoid gh-ref and emailing everyone).

jbenet commented 10 years ago

@lancejpollard collaborators are people working extensive on that project or Dat Project as a whole. Contributors are people who've committed code to that repo.