RFC: Properly stated origin of code contributions

Jan Stolarek jan.stolarek at p.lodz.pl
Thu Oct 30 09:00:49 UTC 2014


> Comments?
+1

However:

> I believe the GHC project should consider setting some reasonable
> ground-rules for contributions to be on the safe side in order to avoid
> potential copyright (or similiar) issues in the future, as well as
> giving confidence to commercial users that precautions are taken to
> avoid such issues.
Projects like Scala and Clojure require filling in a "Contributor [License] Agreement". I have not 
bothered to investigate the exact purpose. My guess is that it is supposed to prevent situations 
like "un-authorized" commiting code into the project. (Meaning: employee of company M commits 
code into the project but then the company says that person was not allowed to do that, beacuse 
the code is patented or sth and requests that the code is withdrawn or sues the project.) Somehow 
I feel that introducing such contributor licenses into GHC would scare away some contributors. 
But then again doing that could prevent some potential problems.

Janek


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