Proposal: Use and Require CLA for QA Devel Project Contributions

[Tim Flink]

On Mon, 26 May 2014 08:40:18 -0400 (EDT)
Kamil Paral <kparal at redhat.com> wrote:

> > That being said, the kernel-style DCO [1] might be worth
> > considering. Nothing fancy, just documentation that lists the DCO
> > and says that by contributing code, you agree to its terms. I'm not
> > sure we need to deal with signing off on code since we don't have a
> > complicated merge process, though.
> > 
> > This is almost no barrier to entry and reduces the possibility for
> > folks to be confused about which license they're contributing under.
> > Overall, I figure it covers most of the use cases we're interested
> > in (other than possibly reverting back to an older license, which
> > isn't a big deal) without causing un-needed problems.
> 
> I thought that the ability to revert to an older license was one of
> the reasons for the proposal. I'm not sure why it's not a big deal
> anymore?

I'd love to keep that an option but if the only way to do that is a
CLA, it's not worth the cost. I'd rather keep track of contributors
than deal with all the problems and bad vibes which come with a CLA.

The change on my end was mostly in realizing how bad of an idea using a
CLA would be.

> Unfortunately I don't have any further comments or recommendations,
> because I'm utterly lost in this legal mumbo-jumbo, sorry.

No worries, I didn't quite realize the can of worms that I was opening
up. I just want to be done with this so that we have user-facing
directive docs and no more licensing/CLA/DCO discussions.

One suggestion was to keep the existing code gpl2+ and distribute as
gpl3 so that we could have the option of removing the gpl3 code later
and redistributing as gpl2+ again if the need/desire arose.

Unless there are objections, I'd like to do that so we can put the
issue to rest for now. The suggestion didn't raise any "no, don't do
that!" on the fedora-legal list when I asked, so I figure that it's
reasonable to move forward on the idea.

We can discuss farther in this thread or in the qa devel meeting later
today.

Tim
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