Gentoo Archives: gentoo-project

From: Ulrich Mueller <ulm@g.o>
To: gentoo-project@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-project] Re: Poll: Would you sign a Contributer License Agreement?
Date: Sat, 09 Jun 2018 09:02:14
Message-Id: 23323.38797.323416.209331@a1i15.kph.uni-mainz.de
In Reply to: [gentoo-project] Poll: Would you sign a Contributer License Agreement? by Ulrich Mueller
1 >>>>> On Wed, 30 May 2018, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
2
3 > A while back I requested information on past copyright assignments
4 > [1]. Since then, we have located some 30 of the assignment forms,
5 > signed by developers (most of them retired by now) in 2004.
6
7 > Here is the second part of the exercise. The current draft of the
8 > new Gentoo copyright policy [2] arranges for two procedures:
9
10 > 1. Certifying agreement to a "Gentoo Developer's Certificate of
11 > Origin" by including a "Signed-off-by" line with every commit.
12 > This would be virtually identical to the procedure used for the
13 > Linux kernel, and would be mandatory. A draft of the Gentoo DCO
14 > can be seen at [3].
15
16 > 2. In addition, according to the current policy draft, developers
17 > would be encouraged to sign a "Gentoo Contributor License
18 > Agreement (CLA)". Its current draft version is at [4]. However,
19 > this would be completely voluntary and *not* be required. The
20 > exact workflow hasn't been drafted yet, but PGP signing of the
21 > form would be one possibility. (Also note that the form includes
22 > fields for real name and postal address.)
23
24 > The goals of the second item is to "make compliance with this policy
25 > easier (fewer copyright holders to list), and allow the Foundation
26 > to enforce copyrights and re-license content if appropriate" [2].
27 > Apparently, we will only be able to achieve these goals if a
28 > significant fraction of contributors will sign the CLA.
29
30 > So, before I pursue more work on the CLA I would like to ask all
31 > developers and contributors:
32
33 > - Would you sign a "Gentoo Contributor License Agreement", similar
34 > to the current draft in [4]?
35
36 > Please reply to me personally; I shall post a summary to the
37 > gentoo-project mailing list in one week from now.
38
39 Time to post a summary: I have received 24 answers in total, 22 from
40 developers and 2 from users.
41
42 9 answers said they would sign such an agreement,
43 12 answers said they would not sign it, or would not be allowed to
44 by their employer,
45 3 answers were undecided or non-committal.
46
47 It is still difficult to extrapolate from these numbers. My impression
48 (also from replies in mailing lists) is that achieving 50% coverage
49 would be a very optimistic assumption. Also there were some very
50 active devs amongst the "no" replies.
51
52 For the time being, we have therefore removed the FLA/CLA section from
53 the (pre-)draft of the copyright policy [2]. I shall post it soon as a
54 GLEP draft for wider rewiev.
55
56 Thanks to everyone who has replied.
57
58 Ulrich
59
60
61 [1] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/4958621b17b00eac7aaca1c8737b8b57
62 [2] https://dev.gentoo.org/~ulm/glep-drafts/glep-0076.html
63 [3] https://dev.gentoo.org/~ulm/glep-drafts/glep-0076.html#certificate-of-origin
64 [4] https://dev.gentoo.org/~ulm/cla/cla.pdf