Contributor License Agreement about recastnavigation HOT 4 CLOSED

Hi @dougbinks, thanks for getting involved :)

The reason I suggested adding a CLA is that I know companies that avoid using open-source libraries like this because they fear getting sued by contributors, or even other companies that legally own contributors' work. Say for example someone contributed a feature to Recast whilst under the employ of company A - company B could then get sued by company A if they make use of Recast.

I'm a developer, not a lawyer, so I would prefer a world where this wasn't an issue. But this is the world we live in so I'm suggesting it to hopefully make it easier for more people to use Recast safely :)

That said... you're right, this would put a burden on contributors, and clearly would put off at least some of them, yourself included. Maybe it's better to leave things the way they are, and leave the legal burden with users? Without contributors, the project is nothing, after all. Any more opinions on this?

Two other minor things to mention:

• Apache 2.0 has quite a lot of legalese too - at a glance it looks just as scary as a CLA.
• Here's a more nicely formatted example of a CLA, which is almost word-for-word the same as the Django one: https://cla.developers.google.com/about/google-individual?csw=1

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@JanielS, @grahamboree What are your thoughts on this? There has only been one opinion expressed besides my own so far, if either of you are doubtful or against it then we should just drop it now and close this issue.

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If companies do not want to use R&D out of fear of getting sued by contributors that's a big problem. However, I think it is also a problem to impose a CLA when we have so few contributors to begin with. So I would say we should leave it as it is now without a CLA, and not impose additional barriers on new contributors.

If we really are excluding companies this way we can always reevaluate. If someone is considering R&D but have problems with this I hope they will reach out! With that said I'm also not sure how CLA's work retroactively if we do change our minds later.

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We'd need to chase down all previous contributors and either get them to sign a CLA, or remove their contributions somehow, whether we implement this now or later. So, it'll always be a PITA for us!

Your answer is good enough for me; I'll close this and leave it alone for now. If it becomes an issue in future we can revisit.

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