Steve's blog

There's a claim on their website that they are a "community-centered group", but I don't see any list of people and organisations who contributed to this work. That bothers me. Regarding their aim to "assist organisations which use contribution agreements", I don't think that there is anything of value here for the Free Software community at all. Free Software developers don't need contribution agreements, and in my opinion encouraging their use like this is only going to cause further splintering of the community. We've managed for a very long time without them, why start now?

As a developer, I personally don't believe in contribution agreements at all. If I contribute code to a project, it will be under the terms of a good Free Software license or not at all. That's all that's needed. There's a fair body of opinion out there on this - see pieces from Bradley Kuhn, Richard Fontana and Dave Neary for more discussion.

What do you think?

16:57 :: # :: /debian/issues :: 1 comment

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Re: Project Harmony?
Jonathan Carter wrote on Wed, 13 Jul 2011 19:16

For most free software projects it is indeed unnecessary, Canonical needs contributor agreements though for copyright assignment, which admittedly doesn't have any benefit for users or developers, but it is useful for Canonical themselves.

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