Contributing: MasterDuke17, Authorize or Redact?

[wbraswell]

@MasterDuke17

We now have official contributing guidelines, please review the following documents:

https://github.com/wbraswell/rperl/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING

https://github.com/wbraswell/rperl/blob/master/ASSIGNMENT

https://github.com/wbraswell/rperl/blob/master/EMPLOYERS

I need to know, would you like to fulfill the CONTRIBUTING guidelines so we can keep your RPerl contribution?

Thanks in advance!

[MasterDuke17]

I'm sorry, I would like to, but there's no way I could get my employer to understand why they had to sign such a document.

[wbraswell]

@MasterDuke17

Thank you very much for your reply, I can appreciate the difficult situation with your employer.

I will redact your 1 commit to date, and I would love to work with you again in the future if your situation allows.

:-)

[rfdrake]

I know this is coming from an outsiders point of view, but that contributors agreement seems impossible to get through even tiny companies. The need for a notary alone would raise red flags with most management that would be unexplainable.

Of course you're welcome to stick with what works for you, but I think this is going against the spirit of open source and social coding. An example: I download rperl, fix a minor problem that has been bugging me and submit a pull request all without looking at the requirements for contribution. You ask me to sign the agreement and either I say no (too much trouble) or my company does, or you might get someone who just fires out patches and doesn't followup so they never bother to reply with a "no".

At this point everyone's time is wasted and a feature either never gets implemented or a bugfix might need to be rewritten to avoid copyright issues. All of which could be avoided with a simpler "I give up all rights to this code, it is now public domain." Especially if it's a 3 line patch.

Here are some examples that are less restrictive but are still in common use:

1. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oca-405177.pdf
2. https://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt
3. http://www.ubuntu.com/legal/contributors/submit

Here is a program that manages contributor license agreements for you via github (never used it, just found it while researching this issue). If you figure out a way to make it click through and use oauth with the github ID then I imagine people won't mind doing it, but printing/signing/scanning/emailing is another hurdle that people just won't cross for the aforementioned 3 line patch.

https://www.clahub.com/

[bmwiedemann]

One note from my side: the Linux kernel just goes with individual author's copyright and has been successfully enforced in courtrooms anyway, because any author of a significant portion (e.g. Harald Welte) could sue for infringement.
The only thing that is much harder without copyright-assignment is changing the license later.

[DemiMarie]

I would not be surprised if someone winds up forking RPerl over this.

[wbraswell]

@DemiMarie
RPerl is far too complex for anyone to actually fork and carry it forward.
But hey, if you feel that strongly about it, that's why there's a "Fork" button on GitHub, so be my guest!

[MasterDuke17]

FWIW, I was in the process of making some other changes (that I hadn't yet committed or PR'ed), but I abandoned them due to the CLA requirement.

[wbraswell]

@MasterDuke17
Please let me know if anything changes with your employer. We now have multiple authorized RPerl contributors, and I'd love to have you join the team! :-)