I was thinking about the signing of CLA for docs volunteers. My happy idea is the group have a group/organization in GH and then the organization signing the CLA. But I don’t know nothing about how the organization in GH works and it can work for this purpose.
Hi @Alvaro – no, Github organizations can’t be used like that. Either a person or a company that a person has control over needs to sign the CLA.
But this thread is about figuring out if we can skip the CLA. We’ve already determined that committing to GH on behalf of other people is likely OK.
I’m going to take this on, and ask some lawyer friends 
If someone is contributing documentation about an open source project to that same open source project I wonder;
- What would anyone submit that they could make any copywrite claim on? I mean people are free to submit or not and surely if they want to retain copywrite they would not do this in the first place?
- I am also thinking how could we even locate copywritten material that is appropriate for use in TiddlyWiki documentation that is not itself already part of the tiddlywiki licences?. Anything more complex than tiddlywiki itself is best linked to anyway.
- I could take someone’s material copywritten on top of tiddlywiki, but will it make any sense as documentation?
Potentially, we can skip having to sign a CLA for anyone, whether core code or docs. Not really looking for opinions here, the next step is to consult a lawyer.
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Boris,
I am not keen on giving opinions either. My point is, and I would expect one would put it to a legal advisor, are contributions to a project, that is itself open source, or has a permissive licence, could such contributions allow anyone assert copywrite anyway?
If the answer is “no” its a non issue. But I think there is value us in warning people to not post something, they or someone asserts copy write over, as well as accepting only documentation refereeing to the way TiddlyWiki works.
That’s pretty much what the CLA says, albeit in legal language: “I have the full copyright of my contributions, and I agree to give those copyrights over to the community”. The way that we handle the CLA in GitHub is designed to provide an audit trail of the signature process.
Stepping back, none of this is unique to TiddlyWiki, and we can learn a lot from how other projects are handling it, which is the thinking that led to us starting to use a CLA in 2011: at the time, it was the standard practice for serious open source projects.
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As mentioned at: contributing.md the CLAs where derived from the Harmony Project Templates.
I did adjust them to fit the TW project.
Important info about the templates: Guide to the CAs | Harmony Agreements
Relicensing TiddlyWiki is entirely covered by the BSD 3 clause for code and the CC-BY license for prose text.
The CLA is needed for the other way around, to allow TW to use contributed 3rd party content, without getting problems in the future.
It’s worth noting for everyone that there’s been a bit of a shift on this practice in recent years and a number of people are now strongly opposed to having them (see for instance Why CLAs aren’t good for open source). There are places where they’re useful (e.g., if the project wants to use contributions under a different license than the one the software is published under), but (so the argument goes) the open-source community norm is and always has been that submitting contributions is implicitly agreeing to license them under the license attached to the software, so if that’s all you want, the agreement isn’t really necessary. And excessive use of CLAs could arguably harm other projects that don’t use one by eroding that norm to the point that a court might not consider it obvious enough in the future. Not to mention that it’s a significant barrier for new contributors.
I don’t have a particularly strong opinion, but I’d be in favor of removing any bureaucracy that turns out to be unnecessary.
The general consensus (not law) is that contributions to a repo fall under the license for the code.
One of the reasons to sign CLAs is to allow for easy relicensing in the future.
CLAs are most common when a company owns the copyright and wants to retain the ability to relicense the code. Often, this is when something is eg GPL or AGPL, and then non open source private licenses are sold. A dual license strategy.
This doesn’t apply to TW, and if there is no intent to relicense, then it may no longer be needed.
Thanks for this — great article.
I also don’t have a strong opinion. We’re examining a tiny piece of process and reviewing whether it can / should be changed.
Here are two other links.
And then the rebuttal, with lots of background info and nuance:
This last link is who I was going to ask a casual question of. Kyle Mitchell is an open source lawyer who is also a programmer I know. I highly recommend the rest of his blog if you’re interested in these topics.
In Kyle’s post, he suggests asking in the comments of the first PR. At which point — PR’ing to add your name is really not that much work, and gives us the benefit of a nice list of contributors.
One of the things Kyle advocates for (as do I) is that open source software (OSS) is going through a lot of changes, and sustainability for contributors should be a concern.
He mainly wants to preserve the ability for (easier) re-licensing to something like Prosperity Non-Commercial https://prosperitylicense.com/ — free & open source for everyone if you don’t make money with the software, otherwise buy a license.
I don’t think TW wants / needs to do anything in that regard.
I gave a short talk a couple of years ago if open source licensing evolution is something you’re interested in:
So in summary — maybe we don’t need the CLA process any more. Likely we’re fine with commits of “second hand” content, especially if we ask for a comment on the PR.
The blog post mentioned talks about “Apache-style CLAs” which is mentioned 10 times all over the text. This is meant by Apache-style CLA: https://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.pdf
The workflow mentioned there has nothing to do with our workflow, where signing is as simple as creating a PR.
If creating a PR is considered a problem, than we will need to improve this mechanism, because messing with the CLA won’t change anything with the underlying problem.
In terms of CLA, can I assume anything in the forums is fair game?
If someone, say Eric or Saq, posts a really good solution to a common problem, is it OK if I post it to a tiddlywiki.com HowTo ?
These are the practical concerns I have in terms of documentation. Being able to capture these gems in a way that they are not only available to the community, but the community actually looks for them at tiddlywiki.com would help expand usage. How many times have we seen “I googled an answer and couldn’t find anything.” ? Why did they google? Why didn’t they go to TW first? Presumably they had low expectations of what they’d find at TW.
That’s interesting. It’s a long post, so I need more time to read it. But skimming through the text, it seems to cover some important points.
hmmm, That’s not really possible with TW. We re-publish files from other projects (eg codemirror), because we need to wrap them with some code to make them work with TW.
npm install 3rd party libs is not a thing with TiddlyWiki. So we need to be much more specific in that area.
I think this is a separate problem. If we want this to be an option, we need to add a license disclaimer to the forums that says that anything you write can be used under some documentation license. Otherwise the default is presumably that you have to go ask the author/copyright holder before you can reuse it. (I assume most people would say yes, but you’d have to get a hold of them first.)
Unless the forums already have something like this that I’m not aware of? (And it’s probably bad that I’m not aware of it if so…)
I think that as part of the PR, tagging the author and having them comment would be sufficient, as mentioned in Kyle’s post.
That generally “solves” the second hand contribution issue by my reading.
For the forum, you own your content, see ToS.
So you can’t submit material to TW from the forum?
Consider the case where an author has been AWOL for an extensive period of time.
May be we need to add something to the TOS, that “code snippets” or attachments to posts are licensed to TiddlyWiki project automatically, because you posted them here. Except they do include a license tiddler or a link to a license.
StackOverflow does have something similar.
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Let’s not go there. StackWhatever is a pain in the proverbials. 
Just a comment
TT