[openlp-dev] Developer Certificate of Origin

[Raoul Snyman]

Hey folks,

I've been thinking for a while about the legal aspect of people 
contributing to OpenLP (specifically who the code "belongs" to from a 
copyright perspective). It's difficult because we're all from different 
legal contexts (aka different countries), and what might constitute a 
legally binding agreement in one might not in another. The way a lot 
modern open source projects get around this is by making their 
developers sign a Contributor License Agreement, which is supposed to 
help the projects if legal action is taken on the project by some 
company or other entity.

I'm not a fan of CLAs because they can sometimes go as far as forcing 
copyright assignment from one party to another, and this doesn't sit 
well with me.

I recently came across an alternative, which I think works better than a 
CLA. It is called a Developer Certificate of Origin[0]. Basically, you 
just declare that your code that you contributed is your own original 
work, and this way the project as a whole can say, "look, this code was 
not copied from $PRODUCT_X" to anyone who enquires.

What do you think?

[0] https://developercertificate.org/

-- 
Raoul Snyman
+1 (520) 490-9743
raoul at snyman.info