>>>>> On Wed, 30 May 2018, Ulrich Mueller wrote:

> A while back I requested information on past copyright assignments
> [1]. Since then, we have located some 30 of the assignment forms,
> signed by developers (most of them retired by now) in 2004.

> Here is the second part of the exercise. The current draft of the
> new Gentoo copyright policy [2] arranges for two procedures:

> 1. Certifying agreement to a "Gentoo Developer's Certificate of
>    Origin" by including a "Signed-off-by" line with every commit.
>    This would be virtually identical to the procedure used for the
>    Linux kernel, and would be mandatory. A draft of the Gentoo DCO
>    can be seen at [3].

> 2. In addition, according to the current policy draft, developers
>    would be encouraged to sign a "Gentoo Contributor License
>    Agreement (CLA)". Its current draft version is at [4]. However,
>    this would be completely voluntary and *not* be required. The
>    exact workflow hasn't been drafted yet, but PGP signing of the
>    form would be one possibility. (Also note that the form includes
>    fields for real name and postal address.)

> The goals of the second item is to "make compliance with this policy
> easier (fewer copyright holders to list), and allow the Foundation
> to enforce copyrights and re-license content if appropriate" [2].
> Apparently, we will only be able to achieve these goals if a
> significant fraction of contributors will sign the CLA.

> So, before I pursue more work on the CLA I would like to ask all
> developers and contributors:

> - Would you sign a "Gentoo Contributor License Agreement", similar
>   to the current draft in [4]?

> Please reply to me personally; I shall post a summary to the
> gentoo-project mailing list in one week from now.

Time to post a summary: I have received 24 answers in total, 22 from
developers and 2 from users.

    9 answers said they would sign such an agreement,
   12 answers said they would not sign it, or would not be allowed to
      by their employer,
    3 answers were undecided or non-committal.

It is still difficult to extrapolate from these numbers. My impression
(also from replies in mailing lists) is that achieving 50% coverage
would be a very optimistic assumption. Also there were some very
active devs amongst the "no" replies.

For the time being, we have therefore removed the FLA/CLA section from
the (pre-)draft of the copyright policy [2]. I shall post it soon as a
GLEP draft for wider rewiev.

Thanks to everyone who has replied.

Ulrich


[1] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/4958621b17b00eac7aaca1c8737b8b57
[2] https://dev.gentoo.org/~ulm/glep-drafts/glep-0076.html
[3] https://dev.gentoo.org/~ulm/glep-drafts/glep-0076.html#certificate-of-origin
[4] https://dev.gentoo.org/~ulm/cla/cla.pdf