[opam-devel] Opam license bug

[Daniel Bünzli]

Le lundi, 18 janvier 2016 à 20:50, Yaron Minsky a écrit :
> Daniel, would you be opposed to a CLA if the code were released under a more liberal license? For our open source code, Jane Street was advised to use a CLA, even though we were using a liberal license (Apache, in particular.) I'm curious if the CLA itself is a problem, or just the CLA in combination with a restrictive license?

It depends on the terms of the CLA and if I'm actually able to get a reasonable grasp of it and its implications by myself.

For example if the CLA only asks me to grant the rights under the license of the project itself and to guarantee that I'm the actual author of the code I guess I could actually sign that. Though it feels more like bureaucracy and barriers that needed, this should somehow be implied by the act of committing to the repo under your name (but IANAL).  

However I would still not want the proposed CLA mentioned in this thread with a liberal license — just start talking about licensing patent grants for your company (pt 3.) in your terms and the lawyers of possibly contributing companies will start to trip out. As Thomas mention we should rather look to make it easier to accept contributions in opam than increase the legal work needed to do so.

On a more personal level I'm interested in keeping the lawyers as much as possible out of the loop* and I'm only willing to work with projects that have the same attitude, I do not see CLAs in general as being part of this attitude.

Best,  

Daniel

* w.r.t. I'm actually planning to gradually relicense all my software under a simpler license than the BSD3 I have been using for now.