[ocaml-platform] Maintainer notifications for opam-builder -- and other opam-builder enhancements

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

> On 30 Sep 2016, at 19:31, Fabrice Le Fessant <fabrice.le_fessant at ocamlpro.com> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 3:40 PM Anil Madhavapeddy <anil at recoil.org> wrote:
> That is correct, but how does this fit in with the request for contributions that Gabriel issued?  External contributors presumably need to sign a CLA with OCamlPro to give them copyright retention over the source code so that you can dual license it.  Has Gabriel signed such a CLA for https://github.com/OCamlPro/opam-builder/pull/27, and are other contributors expected to do the same?
> 
> I don't understand the relationship between AGPL and the need for a CLA. Many free-software or open-source projects make their contributors sign a CLA (even Docker asks PRs to contain a sign-off), this is completely unrelated to using AGPL, BSD, or whatever.

You stated that:

> The AGPL license cannot harm OPAM, as, as an owner of opam-builder's code, OCamlPro is allowed to redistribute opam-builder's code under whatever licence,

but this dual-licensing only holds as long as only OCamlPro employees (who presumably license their IPR to the company) are the sole contributors.  Otherwise patches will come in under the license that the original source code was published under (AGPLv3) and cannot be relicensed without agreement of all the contributors.  This is a similar process to the one we embarked on for opam-repository ages ago (CC0) and opam itself recently (LGPLv2+exception). 

>  By the way, I didn't need to ask Gabriel to sign the CLA because his contribution, although significative by its impact, is not significative by the number of lines.

I'm afraid I don't understand the legal subtleties here.  I'd be grateful if someone could point me to a guide that explains who judges the threshold of the lines of code required before the patch becomes significant.  And what happens if the patch contributor disagrees.  Dual licensing seems complex enough that the contributors should be aware of it...

regards,
Anil