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List:       incubator-general
Subject:    Re: Software Grants for GitHub Projects...
From:       Benson Margulies <bimargulies () gmail ! com>
Date:       2015-01-31 17:09:48
Message-ID: CALhtWkdxA=gV5SfTGYtq=Kna2pgs+4uZY3MSPw++Ec4LyeMi2Q () mail ! gmail ! com
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On Sat, Jan 31, 2015 at 11:32 AM, Matt Franklin
<m.ben.franklin@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat Jan 31 2015 at 11:22:15 AM Benson Margulies <bimargulies@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Jan 31, 2015 at 10:55 AM, James Carman
>> <james@carmanconsulting.com> wrote:
>> > Are there guidelines for these "usual considerations"?
>>
>> (Queue Marvin on the subject of documentation.)
>>
>> http://www.apache.org/licenses/
>>
>> My understanding: when a significant body of code arrives all at once,
>> the Foundation desires an SGA. That, however, assumes that one legal
>> entity is granting the license to the whole thing. So, if you have a
>> github repo whose contents are assembled of a uniform distribution of
>> small contributions, there would be no point to an SGA. If, on the
>> other hand, the histogram of contribution size versus copyright holder
>> indicated that some copyright owners contributed 'significant' bodies
>> of code, then SGAs from those entities might be called for. There is
>> no established law that allows the Foundation to set hard criteria in
>> terms of lines of code, so this has to be a judgement call, and people
>> sometimes call upon the VP, Legal for assistance in making those
>> judgement calls.
>>
>> For all the small stuff, the safe path is to get an ICLA from each
>> committer, and an email message positively stating an intent to donate
>> the code.
>
>
> Yes, this is the safest approach; but, may not be necessary for changes
> that do not represent significant IP.  For instance, our projects accept
> minor contributions through JIRA, without an ICLA.

There's a critical distinction here. Once you have released a product
under the Apache license, people can contribute new things to it under
the terms of the license. The license has very specific language: if
you take code from us, and then send us a contribution (email, JIRA,
github PR, carrier pigeon) that is a derivative of what you took, you
are granting the code to the Foundation.

That doesn't help with the initial import of a project from github or
bitbucket or Jupiter or Mars; none of those contributions met the
criteria in the license of sending a contribution back to the
Foundation, because the code wasn't here in the first place.

>
>
>
>> Note that copyright still stays with them; they are granting
>> a license, but we also require that code that 'moves into' Apache some
>> with some expression of positive intent on the part of the
>> author/copyright owner.
>>
>>
>> >
>> > On Saturday, January 31, 2015, Benson Margulies <bimargulies@gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> >> On Sat, Jan 31, 2015 at 8:44 AM, James Carman
>> >> <james@carmanconsulting.com <javascript:;>> wrote:
>> >> > Is there a "standard" within the incubator about how we go about
>> >> > getting the appropriate forms filled out when we want to incubate a
>> >> > project from GitHub?  GitHub fosters a sort of fly-by contribution
>> >> > model (and that's a good thing), but it makes donating the code a bit
>> >> > troublesome, because we need to make sure that all (to a certain
>> >> > degree?) of the contributors do, in fact want to donate the code they
>> >> > contributed to the foundation.
>> >>
>> >> Simple answer: no. It is up to you to get ICLA/CCLA/SGA as appropriate
>> >> for all contributors based on the usual considerations of contribution
>> >> size, copyright ownership, and provenance clarity. if you have some
>> >> stray commits that you can't cover, you can either reimplement, or
>> >> make an argument that are below the threshold of concern. The github
>> >> metadata helps a bit, but since you have no guarantee that the
>> >> committer is the author, there's no possible way to see this as
>> >> automated. The fact that code is published under the AL does _not_
>> >> make it automatically code that you can pull in no matter what else.
>> >> We require a positive intent to contribute the code to the foundation.
>> >>
>> >> >
>> >> > Note that this problem isn't necessarily unique to GitHub, but Git
>> >> > itself somewhat highlights the issue because contributions from
>> >> > outside parties (pull requests) do maintain metadata about their
>> >> > original authors.  With SVN, typically someone with "karma" has to do
>> >> > the commit and it gets tagged with their identity, so the audit trail
>> >> > goes cold (comments can contain attributions, but that's hard to
>> >> > report on).
>> >> >
>> >> > Anyway, just looking for some guidance here.  We are trying to move
>> >> > TinkerPop forward and how exactly we go about getting the forms filled
>> >> > out properly is somewhat of a blocker.
>> >> >
>> >> > Thanks,
>> >> >
>> >> > James Carman, Assistant Secretary
>> >> > Apache Software Foundation
>> >> >
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>> >>
>>
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