Should open source communities avoid contributor agreements?
Attempting to retain control of an open source project leads to mistrust, contention, and a rules-based focus that diminishes your reputation
Follow @infoworldContributor agreements that aggregate the copyrights of open source code in favour of a single corporate sponsor are a sure sign of a community where one member has more rights than the rest. And equality is the key to success.
A collaborative activity dubbed Project Harmony is now under way between corporate and corporate-sponsored participants in the free and open source software communities (not to be confused with the Apache Java project of the same name). The project seeks to harmonise the various participant and contributor agreements - collectively termed "contributor agreements" by some - used by many open source projects.
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The goal of the project's initiators is to reduce the legal costs of analysing paperwork faced by companies contributing to open source projects. Initiated and sponsored by Canonical, meetings have already been held several times under the Chatham House Rule, including one recently during LinuxCon in Boston. The participants also number several people who are skeptical of the value of copyright aggregation, myself included. At the meeting I was asked to write about my skepticism; this article is the result. I'm by no means the first to tread this ground; you'll also want to read the earlier article by Dave Neary, and the comprehensive article by Michael Meeks ends with a useful list of other articles.
What are "contributor agreements", why do they exist, and are they a good thing? The need often arises from the interaction with open source of certain approaches to business. They serve a need of those approaches, but they can come at a significant cost to the health of the project. If you're starting a new project, it's worth understanding the bigger picture before diving in with a practical guide on the assumption "everyone uses contributor agreements" because not everyone does. For good reasons.
