[Flow] RFC: Drop CLA for Flow and Neos

[Dominique Feyer]

Hi Helmut,

What a nice topic ;) 

I understand and support your point on the subject. But maybe with a more radical vision on my side. 

I think that GPL can be a blocker too. LGPL vs MIT is maybe a more complexe subject. But my personal favorite is MIT definitively. You can see big project like Symfony all component and the CMF have move to MIT. 

I’m a big open source fan, but I think that freedom doesn’t support limit. And GPL enforce limitation of what you can do with a piece of code and is a tainting licence, so that’s not really freedom. 

About the CLA, if we have a more permissive licence we can drop it. Any contributor is welcome. Having to sign a document to push a single line of code can be a big barrier. I think about small contribution, small documentation update, … 

We present Neos a CMS that can be used to support the CMS parts of any Flow application … but has Neos is GPL and Flow LGPL … I think that can be a blocker for some project. Having a clear and simple licensing is highly welcome I think

Having some big or small company using Flow/Neos internally for closed source projet can be a plus the community I think.

So my 2 cents, is move everything to MIT and drop the CLA. 

Bests,

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Le 14 juillet 2014 à 23:20:11, Helmut Hummel (helmut.hummel at typo3.org) a écrit:

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  
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Helmut Hummel  
Release Manager TYPO3 6.0  
TYPO3 Core Developer, TYPO3 Security Team Member  

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