[Flow] RFC: Drop CLA for Flow and Neos

[Helmut Hummel]

Hi!

One blocker for the FLow and Neos project is the constant lack of 
resources (time and money of the contributors) and the relatively low 
number of contributors.

While there are for sure many other things to address to reach out to 
potential new contributors, I am pretty sure that our Contributors 
Licence Agreement (CLA)[1] plays a role here.
At least it is one additional hurdle to take before one can start 
contributing code.

Therefore I would like to suggest to drop the Contributors Licence 
Agreement.

The reason for the CLA (as I understood) is to allow an easy change of 
the licence (currently LGPL 3 for Flow and GPL 3 for Neos), because it 
"can be done"[3] without asking every single contributor for permission.

Two things here:

1. Do we think *now* that a copyleft licence (e.g. GPL) is good for the 
project to prosper? If so, keep it and drop the CLA. If not, change it 
to a more permissive licence (e.g. MIT) *now* and drop the CLA.

2. Changing the licence at a later point (if we think it helps for the 
porject to prosper) without a CLA may be harder, but it is not 
impossible. We could even switch from our CLA to a FLA like e.g KDE[2] 
which is *optional* to sign and not *mandatory*


I think one of the key questions here is what licence do we think is the 
best for the project(s). I have no answer to that unfortunately. I also 
suspect that it might be impossible to answer.

But keeping a potential blocker for contributions just to avoid a 
decision does not make sense to me.

I layed out my opinion and I'm looking forward to hear yours :)

Kind regards,
Helmut

[1]http://typo3.org/index.php?id=782
[2]http://ev.kde.org/rules/fla.php
-- 
Helmut Hummel
Release Manager TYPO3 6.0
TYPO3 Core Developer, TYPO3 Security Team Member

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