openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Ovnicraft <ovnicraft@xxxxxxxxx>]

IMHO add in changelog file for each component the name of contributors is
ok, i see that in many open source projects.

Regards,

On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 1:15 PM, Fabien Pinckaers <fp@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hello Stefan,
>
> Thank you for your feedback.
>
> > thank you for your passionate reaction. I believe that you share the same
> passion for Open Source software and the OpenERP products in particular as
> we do.
>
> Yes, and I take this opportunity to also thank you for the great contrib
> you did too.
>
>
> > It is vital for us to contribute to the OpenERP framework and the core
> modules, so we would always prefer the option of copyright assignment in a
> contributor agreement. You raise a number of valid issues with regards to
> protecting the OpenERP products against copyright violations and other
> problems which argue in favour of such copyright assignment. I do not think
> that anyone can argue against them, and it is for such reasons that projects
> like Plone and KDE may ask for copyright assignment in a contributor
> agreement.
>
> Actually, my preferred solution is the public domain for small
> contributions to the framework or the official modules.
>
> I think it's very boring to ask people to sign a document and send us by
> fax/mail just because they contributed a few lines of code -> doing
> contracts with community members is not the way I see a good collaboration
> (this was the reason why we did not made it before: we supposed that if a
> contributor did not put a copyright in his code, merge proposal or patch, it
> is considered public domain)
>
> But I understand some may prefer a contributor agreement. If some wants a
> contributor agreement, I propose to use the one of the FSFE. Does anybody
> have any bad feedback about this contributor agreement ?
>
> So, my question is: is it ok for you to put contributions to the framework
> or official addons in the public domain or you prefer a contributor
> agreement ? (of course, your own modules should be under your own copyright)
>
> > However, the problem is that assigning copyrights to a commercial entity
> does not always help when the issues that you mention occur. We know you
> personally to be a great proponent of Open Source but your successor or your
> creditors may not. OpenERP SA may be sold to a different party, or take up a
> very different attitude for some other reason. When that happens, and
> OpenERP SA has all the copyrights, we will never be able to update the
> license to protect the OpenERP products or enforce the licenses in court.
>
> OpenERP SA will not be sold to third parties, I own a significant part of
> the shares to ensure that. The biggest risk for OpenERP SA is not to be sold
> but to fail building a profitable business model allowing to sustain the
> fast evolution of the OpenERP product. In that case OpenERP may finish like
> GNUe, adempiere, ... in a few years. That would be the worst scenario in my
> opinion.
>
> But even if it is (suppose I die in an accident), it does not change the
> fact that OpenERP is currently under AGPLv3. Nobody can change this.
>
>
> > If we follow best practices in open source, then we set up a non-profit
> membership organisation as in the case of Plone and KDE, for contributors to
> assign their copyrights to. The FSFE/KDE agreement [1] would be perfect for
> that.
>
> By doing that, you may have the invert effect than what you expect:
>
> * the more people are involved in a decision, the less chances you have to
> make the evolution ->  if 50% of the contributors have to agree to change
> from AGPLv3 to a potential AGPLv4, you have a risk that you can never
> upgrade. I would never take this risks for OpenERP
> * I don't imaging starting a discussion to define the status of such an
> organisation. It would be a long debate and we all have more important
> things to do than legal researches, discussion on status, official meetings
> and votes, ...
> * just imagine the questions you have to cover in the status:
>       - who can join  ? --> those that commit more than 1% of the lines of
> code (then there would be only OpenERP) ? what do you do if a lot of devs
> from microsoft that contribute and join the association ?
>       - how do you take take desisions ? 80% of votes according to the
> importance of the contributor based on the lines of code --> then only
> OpenERP sa can take the decisions.
>       - who will pay the costs of the organization ? what will be the
> budget and forecasted costs ? how can the association enforce the protection
> of the license in a court ? --> this can quickly costs more than 100k$
>       - what's the responsibilities of the organization ? it is logic that
> the one who get the copyright ensure the evolution of his code.
>       - if the association decide to remove the "private use" clause of
> OpenERP Enterprise, who will pay my developers that are partly financed by
> this ? If nobody, who will ensure OpenERP will grow quickly in the future.
>
> As a summary, we clearly all have more important things to do than this. I
> don't want OpenERP community to enter in such debates, it's a waste of time.
>
>
>
>
> What do you think about putting all small contributions to official modules
> and framework in the public domain ? this is the best solution as it does
> not require a copyright assignment (to OpenERP SA or to an association).
>
> This solution is also very fair as a contributor can apply a special
> licence for his own code (that he may use in others softwares) and we can
> put his code in the core without having to ask a contributor agreement
> signature. We protect both the unity of OpenERP and the personnal contrib of
> each one.
>
>
> --
> Fabien
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-- 
Cristian Salamea
@ovnicraft