Questions to OSI Board quorum
Ernest Prabhakar
prabhaka at apple.com
Wed Nov 16 07:11:12 UTC 2005
Hi David,
On Nov 15, 2005, at 5:44 PM, David Barrett wrote:
> But what comes immediately to mind is the absence of any mention of
> contributor agreements, despite them proving to be a tremendously
> important tool in some of the largest, well organized, and most
> successful open source projects.
Its a question of scope. The OSI has (historically) only focused on
Open Source *licenses*. Project governance issues, while quite
important, are a very different beast.
The reason, IMHO, is that contributor agreements are an explicit *opt-
in* tied to the project leadership at a given point in time -- not
associated with the code for perpetuity. Yes, it is an
administrative convenience to be able to embed that in the license,
but at the price of hard-coding that steward with every copy of the
source code.
Whether or not you think it is worth the price, I think the OSi is
correct to consider that a very different thing.
-- Ernie P.
More information about the License-discuss
mailing list