[CentOS-devel] CentOS CLA (Contributor License Agreement)

Jim Perrin jperrin at centos.org
Mon Jun 29 16:31:13 UTC 2015



On 06/29/2015 11:03 AM, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 10:53:31AM -0500, Jim Perrin wrote:
>>> I'm curious which areas you find too restrictive. The list of
>>> acceptable open source / free software licenses? Or, you need to be
>>> able to accept unlicensed contributions? (Note that the list includes a
>>> number of very unrestrictive licenses, including CC0 and WTFPL (or NLPL
>>> if you prefer.)
>> A bit of both. We may need some unlicensed contributions so something
>> like "if you submit code you wrote without a license, the default distro
>> license of GPLv2 applies"  or something.
> 
> Right, that "something" is almost all of what the FPCA does — except
> MIT instead of GPL.



> I am kind of getting the sense that people who are opposed to the FPCA
> haven't actually looked at it. :-/

It *is* a somewhat imposing 'wall-o-text' in legalese, and the FAQs on
the wiki page call out the conversion from the old agreement to the new
one, not necessarily common scenarios for acceptable code. (I'm looking
at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Fedora_Project_Contributor_Agreement,
is there a *better* version to read? )


>> The other bit that may come up is the need to distribute non-free (but
>> legal) code. For example a hardware vendor supplies a binary blob for an
>> aarch64 network card, or a SIG decides to include the nvidia binary etc.
>> So long as they can be legally distributed without cost, it should be
>> possible.
> 
> Under section 1 of the FPCA, as long as there is some authorization
> from the copyright holder, this would be okay. (Our list of approved
> open source / free software licenses is explicitly given as one form of
> authorization, but not necessarily the only one.)

In theory, yes however from an outsider's perspective this is rarely if
ever used. The nvidia drivers being the primary example of something
users would rejoice over.


-- 
Jim Perrin
The CentOS Project | http://www.centos.org
twitter: @BitIntegrity | GPG Key: FA09AD77


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