[Zope-dev] [Checkins] SVN: zc.buildout/ Moved to github

[Jens Vagelpohl]

On Aug 18, 2012, at 15:46 , Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 18, 2012 at 10:39 AM, Jens Vagelpohl <jens at dataflake.org> wrote:
>> Legally this must be a fork then and I'm not sure it can be released as official Zope Foundation software anymore if you make releases from GitHub. Reason: the ZF can no longer ascertain that only official ZF contributor agreement signers have modified code in the package, which is a core requirement for software released from Zope Foundation repositories/under Zope Foundation auspices.
> 
> Is this because of the support for merging pull requests? Is that
> really legally different than a contributor making a merge from a
> patch?

Hi Lennart,

The contributor agreement requires you as the contributor to be able to enter into the contract with the Zope Foundation transferring one half ownership to the Zope Foundation. You can only enter into this contract if you own (as in "wrote") the code yourself - you cannot assign ownership to someone else for something you don't fully own.

The goal of these contractual requirements is to make sure software stored in the Zope Foundation is as "clean" as possible from an ownership standpoint. People who use code from svn.zope.org have a reasonable assurance that no third party will show up on your doorstep demanding money or license fees for code that third party claims to own.

I've just recently seen what can happen for projects not following this kind of strict policy: The python-ldap package developers are unable to e.g. assign a new license to their code because since they don't hold any ownership and would need to ask every single developer who ever touched that code - an impossible task. For us that kind of issue does not arise.

jens