On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 8:45 AM, Curt Arnold<carnold@apache.org> wrote:
>
> On Aug 7, 2009, at 1:23 AM, Paul Davis wrote:
>
>> A few shapeless and incomplete thoughts leap to mind:
>>
>>>
>>> As previously mentioned, the JIRA does have an checkbox to indicate that
>>> a
>>> contribution is intended as a contribution. That is intended as a
>>> reinforcement (or an explicit refutation) of the implied license for
>>> things
>>> posted on the mailing lists or in Bugzilla (which lacks the checkbox).
>>> The
>>> implied license for contributions comes from item 5 in the ASL.
>>>
>>>
>>> 5. Submission of Contributions. Unless You explicitly state otherwise,
>>> any Contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the Work
>>> by You to the Licensor shall be under the terms and conditions of
>>> this License, without any additional terms or conditions.
>>> Notwithstanding the above, nothing herein shall supersede or modify
>>> the terms of any separate license agreement you may have executed
>>> with Licensor regarding such Contributions.
>>>
>>
>> As I read this, anyone that submits a patch to me on github has
>> granted ASF license to that contribution unless they specifically
>> state that their contribution was not intended for inclusion. Its
>> still my ass on the line as a committer if I put something in SVN that
>> violates this agreement. The radio button on JIRA is not an absolute
>> requirement for inclusion.
>
> They have granted you (the Licensor in the case of a project fork which work
> on github looks like)
I fail to see how having code on Github is any more of a fork than my
local checkout of the SVN repository.
> a license to use the code under the ASL. That would
> give you the rights to relicense it to the ASF. However, the ASF loses the
> record of the initial contribution. The ASF would be unlikely be covered if
> there was a problem since the ASF relied on your assertion that it was your
> original work, however you would be on the line and the project and users
> could suffer.
>
The rest is roughly my point. The ASF requires that I act
appropriately when committing code. The only issue here is that if I
accept a patch on Github then the ASF has no log of the original
author's contribution. This applies to wherever I receive code
contributions though.
So if we want to address the underlying issue of providence and
logging submissions perhaps we should consider how that could be
improved?
HTH,
Paul Davis
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