This was a topic from our Developer day from an offline conversation with an Open Source Software guru. Let’s continue the conversation here.
He suggested was having some sort of “contribution agreement” from contributors. He’s seen problems where contributors submit IP / Patent encumbered works either inadvertently or by IP holders poisoning what they consider a a competing product.
The contribution agreement can be fairly boiler plate but should include some verbiage about the contribution being clear of known IP issues and is being contributed to Meshtastic freely.
And I have no opinion (yet!) on CLAs because I’ve not really looked into them but when I was just googling to find boilerplates I found some articles like this:
The last paragraph might have a couple of good options. Idreally someone in our group would read up on this topic in general and make a recommendation?
No idea if these are good, bad, or what. But a lot that I’m seeing have a github workflow to sign for the contribution. So having something like that (if we decide to) is something to keep in mind.
Yeah the DCO mentioned in @geeksville article is an interesting alternative. As far as administrative oversight, I imagine the probono legal mentioned on the other thread could help construct something, and we can automate any signature aspect somehow to ease the overhead required.
Yeah. I briefly looked to see if someone has already made a webapp plugin for GitHub to make the “hey you need to sign our agreement, click here to do it automatically”.
To my surprise I failed to find one (though I bet one exists)
Surprising! Maybe we decide if we want one before we build any automations, but I’m sure it can’t be too tricky. The legal jargon is the hardest part there
