[zeromq-dev] RFC: ØMQ Contributions, Copyrights and Control

[Pieter Hintjens]

On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 4:07 PM, Martin Lucina <mato at kotelna.sk> wrote:

> What can I say? Wow! I was hoping something like this would be decided
> eventually -- kudos to you for making this decision.

Well, it's a no-brainer.  Building happy and successful communities
demands that all participants are treated fairly.

Actually it demands a lot more than that but one thing at a time. :-)

> Apropos contributions, to ensure we don't run afoul of any licensing
> problems I think it would be useful to institute a "Certificate of Origin"
> policy using Signed-Off-By: tags in patches or Git commits, similar to what
> is done by the Linux kernel.

I've just finished a draft that covers the policy, see
http://www.zeromq.org/legal:intellectual-property-policy

Comments welcome.  This is taken from Digistan's COSS legal framework,
designed for decentralized ownership.

The next part is to decide how we gateway contributors.  I'd suggest
slowly expanding the current two-level model in which a set of
maintainers accept patches on behalf of named contributors, where
every contributor MUST have stated their agreement with the IP policy.

Patch-based submission would be good IMO, especially since it allows
full workflow on each patch, which is not possible with commits.

Feel free to propose a workflow that you'd be happy with.  From the
legal side, what we need is:

* Real names on all submissions
* Explicit acceptance of IP policy

-Pieter