Comments on: Changing MySQL’s Community Contribution Agreement

By: Log Buffer #117: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

Log Buffer #117: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:19:52 +0000

[...] Here at the Pythian Group Blog, Sheeri Cabral reports that the Community Contribution Agreement has changed to the standard Sun Agreement. [...]

By: Jeremy Cole

Jeremy Cole — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:03:10 +0000

Jay,

Baby steps? Why should switching to Sun’s CLA even be baby steps for this case. The CLA hasn’t been a problem for most of the patches coming in, I’ve, for example, signed it years ago…

Regards,

Jeremy

By: Jay Pipes

Jay Pipes — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:48:52 +0000

Arjen: baby steps, my friend, baby steps :)

By: Arjen Lentz

Arjen Lentz — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 08:36:27 +0000

I think it’s fairly irrelevant, because MySQL has been so atrociously bad about accepting patches, building that version, and having that version towards production use (or just allowing community builds to get patches even in production state).

Also, some big organisations like Yahoo and Google don’t like any kind of contributor agreement simply because it’s a big legal complication. So this means that capable patch coders will just not bother and get on with their work.
It’s a trade-off of that and having extra work when doing updates. They choose the latter, because their production systems don’t get updated that often. Plus they’re techies, not legal eagles.

Finally, the key objective is for Sun/MySQL to have full ownership of the code. But the only one that cares about that is Sun/MySQL. The dual licensing is a pest that needs to disappear. Leaves issues like originating IP guarantee and indemnity. I’m not sure that’s much of an issue, since many organisations use Linux and lots of other OSS tools also, where the IP origin is possibly questionable, and the IP ownership is definitely diverse.

So, Sun/MySQL needs to either re-think the “do we really need a contributor agreement”, and if they decide for it, re-think the setup so that potential contributors are actually enticed to sign up. For instance, speedy incorporation of patches would do wonders, I reckon. But right now? Nah. Don’t care.

By: Giuseppe Maxia

Giuseppe Maxia — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 08:32:41 +0000

Damn! You stole Jay’s thunder! :)
Stay tuned. The official news will come very soon.
http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/CLA

Giuseppe

By: Bill Karwin

Bill Karwin — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 07:38:56 +0000

I worked on the Zend Framework, where we used a CLA based on the Apache CLA. It was fairly dense legalese, and it caused some anxiety and misunderstanding from some of the community.

The Sun Contributor Agreement is much easier to read and it’s more clear as a result. I hope community members are more comfortable with it.

It also makes it clear that a contributor does not give up any rights by making the contribution, which IIRC is different from the old MySQL CLA.