Third time’s the charm!

Nice! Finally!

The only tricky thing at the moment is that there have been debates about libpijul’s license (way too much for my taste, actually).

These patches of yours are among the first ones that touch it, all other contributions so far have been on Pijul (except one related to fixing clippy warnings). Since I want to avoid any legal issues later, I’m wondering what the current contributors would think of signing a contributor license agreement for libpijul (contributions to Pijul wouldn’t require it). The process would essentially be about PGP-signing a license written by the Harmony project (a project started by Canonical, and used in many open source projects), saying that you transfer copyright of your contributions to the project maintainer.

Would that be ok for you, for example?

The process would essentially be about PGP-signing

This would be an offputting barrier for me as I don’t maintain a PGP identity.

a license saying that you transfer copyright of your contributions to the project maintainer.

Any form of CLA will require me to go through an approval process with my employer which can otherwise be avoided. I’m not sure my employer is willing to approve CLAs which transfer copyright, though I have blanket approval to contribute to public repositories under nearly any conventional open source license. AFAIK the only reason you’d want this is if you plan to change the license in the future; is that needed? Could you multi-license up front instead, as is common in Rust?

(I don’t personally mind transferring copyright in principle, but I would like to be able to contribute to Pijul without entering muddy legal waters re: my employment contract, and I work for a major tech employer so I imagine many others will have a similar issue)

Thanks for your answer! When you say:

I have blanket approval to contribute to public repositories under nearly any conventional open source license

How does this work in practice? Do you retain copyright of your contributions, and license them to the projects?

Alright, I can see simpler ways to do this. I like the way Google does it for Go.

How does this work in practice?

IANAL, but my understanding is that unless explicitly stated otherwise, contributions made to an open source project are copyrighted by the contributor, and licensed under the terms under which the project is distributed. That’s a matter of copyright law in general rather than employer policy.

the way Google does it for Go.

As in, a CLA that applies an unconditional copyright and broad patent license? That will still require human approval, but seems like better odds. If you like, I can run specifics by the company lawyers before you commit to an approach.

Alright, I finally found time to review your changes to Pijul. I’ve also rewritten your patches to libpijul. I’m working on a formal solution for the CLA, should be ready soon.

Thanks!