Requirement to sign 'Apache' based agreement

English Language - Forum Licensing
1

Hi,

I’m just wondering about the reasoning behind requiring prospective developers to sign an agreement before a patch is accepted into SalesAgility’s repository. I’m planning on integrating SuiteCRM on behalf of my company and any and all bug fixes /modifications will be released under AGPLv3 through our git repo. I would be very happy for these to be accepted by you guys at SalesAgility. I’ve read the agreement a few times and don’t really understand the implications of it, or really understand why I’d need to sign it.

I’ve submitted patches personally to quite a few other GPL projects and have never needed to sign a form, though perhaps I’ve not really concerned myself with the copywrite implications of a one or two line bug fix.

I’m concerned that something like this will put off prospective helpers - a few PR’s on Github have already stalled because of this.

Any thoughts?

2

Here’s how to shut down an open source project/mire it in complex legislation that costs enormous amounts of time and money:

  1. take some code from a proprietary code base
  2. change some variables and a little structure
  3. donate it to an open source project that may find it useful
  4. open source project accepts the code, uses it and publishes
  5. let the code permeate, percolate and be distributed for say 9 months
  6. sue the ass off the open source project

What the Contributor Agreement does is to protect the project and deflect action to the contributor. Sure it would still be disruptive as the code was refactored/removed … but legal action is against Contributor and not Project.

You can’t contribute to Apache or Linux without signing a Contributor Agreement.

We want SuiteCRM to be the biggest, best, long-term open source CRM project available globally.

So, we need to protect the project and do things properly and I hope all our supporters understand this.

We are going to make it easier to sign an agreement by making digital signatures available.

What else do you need to make it simple to sign a Agreement?

1 Like
3

Thanks for the explanation, that all makes sense. I’m very happy to sign this agreement and will do during this week.

As to making things easier for developers, digital signing would be great, also maybe sticky this post and once digital signing is setup, allow this through the wiki.

Thanks for your structured approach to making sure SuiteCRM lives for a long time

Alasdair