It was already in the CVS when we wrote the rules.
So the policy was different?
(Sorry about the lengthiness, but I felt some recent history was called for.)
Much worse still, there were no policies whatsoever, and the legal status of the whole of Pike was [to an outsider] fuzzy at best. The former legal entity in charge of the repository (present day Roxen IS) considered themselves in ownership of the whole of Pike, but there was no official way of contributing to Pike except for becoming a Roxen employee. Many possible contributions were lost due to the sheer trouble of getting in contact with a person that could say yes or no to anything above a small patch.
So much for the history we wanted to improve on when moving Pike to IDA. As Nilsson points out, the CVS access agreement aims for rules that simplifies managing the repository. The perhaps most important part of that is to allow changes to Pike that requires full ownership - and without getting in touch with countless individual contributors.
The contribution policies aim for being simple both to understand and put to practice. They are however not written in stone, as they might seem. Some especially inappropriate wordings should and will change for the better - that is in my opinion what discussions such as this are good for.
I hope you have not already withdrawn from the thread feeling there is nothing more in it, nor the Pike development, for you.
/ Johan Sundström, Lysator
Previous text:
2003-09-11 17:22: Subject: Re: IDA's policy on Pike contributions
On Thu, Sep 11, 2003 at 11:10:02AM -0400, Martin Nilsson (ja till euro, nej till cent) @ Pike (-) developers forum wrote:
It was already in the CVS when we wrote the rules.
So the policy was different?
code that you would like to include under other arrangements than the standard one, please tell us why it is worth the legal trouble and we'll see what we can do.
I see no legal trouble at all if I will keep the copyright and license the contributed code under GPL/MPL/LGPL.
But I worry that IDA will claim copyright (and ownership) on my contribution. I just don't like this, when someone want to own something made by me :)
Regards, /Al
/ Brevbäraren