[indiana-discuss] Re: [indiana=discuss] Name of Distro?

[Shawn Walker]

On 20/06/07, Chris Mahan <chris.mahan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/20/07, Shawn Walker <binarycrusader at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Which is exactly what I was trying to point out. If Indiana is a
> > community project, not a Sun project, it cannot be called
> > "OpenSolaris."
>
> Does that mean that people who work on Luna_the
> _Community_Project_not_the_Sun_project don't have to sign
> the Sun Contributor Agreement?

No. The whole point of a contributor agreement is to ensure that the
community owns the code. Without one, you have thousands of owners,
and all sorts of legal trouble.

Not only does a contributor agreement help protect a project if
someone comes back later and says the contributor had no right to
contribute the code in question, but it also ensures that the
community has a right to relicense or manage that code as they see
fit.

With that said, nothing is stopping someone from taking all of the
CDDL licensed code that Sun has released and adding to it or starting
their own project (even on OpenSolaris.org!) that does not require a
contributor agreement.

The OpenSolaris project requires a signed agreement for many of the
same reasons that Apache, the Free Software Foundation and many others
require a contributor agreement.

You should also note that the latest contributor agreement states
that: "Any Contribution that Sun subsequently makes available under
any license will also be made available
under a suitable FSF- or OSI-approved license." -
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/about/sun_contributor_agreement/sun_contributor_agreement.1.4.pdf

Its important to note that there are many things and many ways to
contribute that don't require an SCA. You can contribute to GNOME,
xorg, KDE, XFCE, and many other projects that all involve this
community without one. The only time an SCA is required is for
integration with the official codebase afaik.

-- 
"Less is only more where more is no good." --Frank Lloyd Wright

Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst
binarycrusader at gmail.com - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/