[License-discuss] Contributor Clauses in Licenses

[Josh Berkus]

All:

We've seen a recent trend in new licenses to include a clause governing 
contributions to the project (there may be some in older licenses too, I 
haven't done a review).  This seems both weird and ineffective to me, 
because:

1. Unless enforced by some other mechanism (CLA, repository TOS, etc.), 
it is not automatically true that contributions are under the license in 
the first place;

2. A license cannot reasonably contain the full multiple-page-long set 
of the various things that a contributor should comply with, leaving us 
with a very arbitrary selection.

Given the above, I feel like any terms applying to contributors should 
be in individual projects' contributor documentation and governance, and 
have no place in an OSS license.

Discuss?

-- 
Josh Berkus