[ZF] Repository choice: Please indicate your preference until Sunday 9/23

Hanno Schlichting hanno at hannosch.eu
Tue Sep 18 23:29:53 UTC 2012


On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 12:14 AM, Chris McDonough <chrism at plope.com> wrote:
> On 09/18/2012 12:03 PM, Martijn Faassen wrote:
>> So are we going to require anyone who offers a pull request has signed
>> the contributor agreement before it is merged?

Of course we will. We need to get the copyright for any code, no
matter in which way it is contributed.

>> If so, how are people
>> easily going to find out that someone offering a pull request has
>> signed said agreement?

You will be able to go to https://github.com/zopefoundation/ and look
at the list of organization members.

> I don't think this really changes anything.  Legal documents have never
> required every person who has supplied a patch to sign a contributor
> agreement in the past.

That's because patches usually don't contain any sufficiently creative
work that's actually enough to trigger copyright law. The Plone
Foundation adopted a policy on this stuff that errs on the side of
safety: https://plone.org/foundation/materials/foundation-resolutions/patch-policy-052011
In short: You cannot merge anything unless the author of any code has
signed the agreement. Only the release manager can grant exceptions
for this. As there's no release manager for all of ZF code, it might
make sense to have the ZF board approve any deviation from this rule.

Any individual contributor can also make the call on a case-by-case
basis if something is a copyrightable work, but that means the legal
risk lies with that individual for such a case. That's what we've done
so far in accepting patches sent by mail, attached to issues or sent
our way in some other form.

Hanno


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