[TYPO3-mvc] Why we do suck at TYPO3 after all: CLA was: Re: Why don't we suck at TYPO3?

[Steffen Müller]

This posting is conspicuously marked or otherwise designated as "Not a 
Contribution." (Term no.1, CLA, TYPO3 Association [2])

Why we do suck at TYPO3?

The latest mailing from François about "Individual contributor agreement 
is still pending review?" brought up yet another argument for "we do suck".

CLA bureaucracy [1] IMHO lowers the number of contributions.

I have not signed this contract. My contributions are not allowed 
(unwanted). Since I don't agree with CLA, I will not sign it. I even 
don't understand the CLA. It's full of legal terms, clauses and stuff. 
Please don't tell me that I should "trust" Association and "just" sign it.

However chances are, that others are also not willing or able or too 
lazy or whatever to sign it. Result: Less contributions.

A simple example, why CLA sucks:

Bob has written some code to fix an issue in Extbase.
Bob adds the code to the issue tracker in forge. But since Bob has not 
signed CLA, he's not allowed to upload a changeset in git.
Alice has signed the CLA, so she takes the code which has been 
contributed by Bob and uploads it to git. After a successful gerrit 
review, Alice merges the changeset into master.
Some month later legal issue pop up with the code. It turned out, that 
Bob did not write it himself, but took it from a non-free source. 
Someone blames the Association because they publish non-free code within 
TYPO3. Luckily, the CLA allows the association to blame Alice for 
pushing the non-free code. But Alice did not write the code. Poor Alice, 
why blame her? Bob was the bad guy. But who blames Bob? Can he be blamed 
by Association? If yes, the CLA does not make sense. If no, the CLA does 
not make sense. The CLA did not prevent Bob from uploading non-free code 
to forge (or to mailinglist or whatever). Should it?


[1] http://typo3.org/about/licenses
[2] http://typo3.org/fileadmin/association/cla/T3A_CLA_Individual_v1.0.2.pdf

-- 
cheers,
Steffen

TYPO3 Blog: http://www.t3node.com/
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