Indeed. A cla is overkill for ghc. More over, a good CLA  merely documents that I'm granting license under BSD compatible terms, ownership transfer is inappropriate and abusive.

At MOST, "this work is my own and  I grant license for its use In ghc using the BSD license" is plenty.  And even that might be overkill. 

I'm happy to ask the IP lawyers in my family for some opinions on this but I think what we are doing now is fine.

On Oct 30, 2014 9:51 AM, "Joachim Breitner" <mail@joachim-breitner.de> wrote:
Hi,


Am Donnerstag, den 30.10.2014, 09:04 -0400 schrieb Brandon Allbery:
> On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 5:00 AM, Jan Stolarek <jan.stolarek@p.lodz.pl>
> wrote:
>         Projects like Scala and Clojure require filling in a
>         "Contributor [License] Agreement". I have not
>         bothered to investigate the exact purpose.
>
> In the absence of a license agreement, the contribution is usually
> owned by the submitter and not the project (copyright, see Berne
> convention). This doesn't scale very well. A signed CLA allows the
> project to demonstrate that the submitter has agreed to transfer
> ownership of the contribution to the project('s administrators).

Given that the Linux kernel doesn’t require (paper-signed) CLAs, I do
think it scales very well, and does not seem to scare off commercial
users.


> In the absence of a license agreement, the contribution is usually
> owned by the submitter and not the project (copyright, see Berne
> convention). This doesn't scale very well. A signed CLA allows the
> project to demonstrate that the submitter has agreed to transfer
> ownership of the contribution to the project('s administrators).

As long we can properly assume that contributors license the code to us
under the terms of the GHC license (which we seem to do), we got what we
need. No need to hold the copyright in a single place. It’s too late for
that anyways.


Please avoid introducing unnecessary bureaucracy into the contributing
process, especially not due to legal fear, cased from FUD and
smattering.

Greetings,
Joachim



--
Joachim “nomeata” Breitner
  mail@joachim-breitner.dehttp://www.joachim-breitner.de/
  Jabber: nomeata@joachim-breitner.de  • GPG-Key: 0xF0FBF51F
  Debian Developer: nomeata@debian.org


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