The CLA, did everybody sign it and is it still appropriate


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So what does community governance mean?

The founders seem not to be willing to do any large contributions to Diaspora anymore, so the community shall decide, the community shall do, the founders will own. That isn’t exactly my definition of fair.

I’ve no problem with a BSD style license, but donating my work to others without them doing anything for it, is… hardly acceptable.

So we rule this project now, shouldn’t all new contributions be still owned by us, or some sort of non-profit foundation/organization/whatever applies best at least?

Could you provide a link, where’s that stated pls?

https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/New-CLA--12-13-10

Let’s rewrite - !

If you read this you should see it is not an assignment of copyright, but a grant of an AGPL/MIT license to contributed code. D Inc doesn’t “own” the contribution.

While they contract them self to publish your contribution under AGPL/MIT/CC they still own the copyright (well, here in Germany you can’t get rid of your own copyright but that’s another story). Quote “Diaspora is copyright Diaspora Inc., 2010, and files herein are licensed
under the Affero General Public License version 3” https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/blob/master/COPYRIGHT and "# Copyright © 2010-2012, Diaspora Inc. " as the first bytes in almost every file.

Change in license (nondual?) might be voted lateron, but what about a substitution of Diaspora Inc with diaspora foundation?

I think these are some of the basic ideas (in general, not necessarily from the CLA):

“all code released in context of the Diaspora project is published under the AGLP license”
“parts of the code may be re-published under the MIT license if deemed necessary or useful”
“copyright remains with the respective authors” (more or less EU copyright law*)
“by submitting code the author grants an unrestricted right of usage to the Diaspora project”

?

  • in the EU I may agree to a contract signing away my copyright, but that still doesn’t make it so. I simply cannot hand over the authorship of something and with that I retain all associated rights. I may only grant an unrestricted usage right to some other entity. (at least that’s what I remember from my “Daten-&Informatikrecht” course at university)

There is no language in the CLA that attempts or implies reassignment of copyright. Copyright notice doesn’t change it.

I don’t undertand much about licences but from what i am reading here i understand this: Hy world i have this car, Pegeot 206 i give you the right to tune it so call me when it’s done, i am going on vacacions un Europe, when i get back i what may car to be a ferrari. If it’s like this please people, you learned allot this 2 years about how a social red shoul work so make a realy open source social red. This guys don’t give a damn about Diaspora they made the other project (who was donating for Makro.io? is there posible that they did that whit money from Diaspora? )
So let’s say that in 2 month there will be 200 or 500 coders working on Diaspora and in 6 months Diaspora has the best fedration protocol or what ever but when you start to work on apps so users can realy use diaspora like a social red Google or … calls the founders , then the founder decide that you guys did enough and they will do the rest now, and wee have to whait 2 more year for the chat code then 2 more for calendar and 2 more…
Wee need Diaspora to be freeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Diaspora Inc has - as final act of handing over the project to the community - to publish a recall of that CLA, remove it from the complete source and put a new FOSS license we agree on.
It is simply a question of honor and self-evident.

The fundament - for further community-made decisions within the processes we define - I want it to be clear.

I think that the Diaspora Foundation (or whatever) would need to be formed before this could be resolved? (I Am Not A Lawyer, however.)

Founding a proper legal foundation is serious stuff - I’d say we need to get things really going first :slight_smile: Let’s not get tied down in nitty bitty legal stuff.

(not saying the CLA is good as it is)

So there is no such NGO called Diaspora Foundation yet? (somehow I thought it would exist). The website redirects to the project site / JD blog so I assume it does not?!

If there are some people who like to do it, that would be great. But not to overemphasize it in the sense as Jason said is a good idea.

Im my town we are these days also in the process of founding a NGO.

without changing cla, there will no future be, like adri described

I am not sure if there is any organization with the name Diaspora Foundation, but it is not very probable. Why should it be both a Diaspora Inc. and a Diaspora Foundation?
As I understand it Diaspora Inc. has to legally be transformed from a company to a foundation. Or “die” (excuse me for using such a dramatic word) and rise again as the Diaspora Foundation. Let’s not forget that Diaspora is also a trademark. I do not see the community resolving this without direct involvement from the owners of Diaspora Inc.

Altruism, no, Diaspora, Inc is a company owned by people. It is totally separate and what those guys do there is not up to anyone else (any more after the open governance transition plans). Why would they need close shop for a foundation to be set up? :slight_smile: