contributor agreement now up

[Jeffrey McManus]

Hey everybody,

I'm working on a bunch of administrativia related to the open source
release this week. One of the things that we needed to do to
facilitate community contributions is to create a contributor's
agreement. It's here:

http://files.platformassociates.com/legal/pa_contributor_agreement.html

After last night's big check-in, we are now at the point where we can
accept contributions from the community from a technical standpoint.
This agreement is the bit that lets us accept contributions from a
legal standpoint. So, if you feel like you'd ever want to contribute
code or patches to Tinypug, completing this agreement is step 1.

And of course, the first person to do this becomes Tinypug Community
Contributor #1. We would invite you to have this designation embossed
on your business cards, tattooed across your chest, etc. I plan to
make it a practice to purchase round after round of beverages for
official contributors whenever we find ourselves in the same
metropolis.

Regarding the agreement itself and the rationale for having it: Some
companies that back open source projects refer to these as "copyright
assignment agreements" which always to me seemed a little ham-handed.

I researched a little bit and found that lots of different companies
have lots of different ideas about how to do this. After looking at a
bunch, we went with Sun's agreement, which is about as even-handed as
these agreements can be. It protects both the company and the project
(by having contributors assert that their contributions are actually
theirs) as well as the contributor (by establishing that contributors
still own whatever they contribute).

The Sun agreement is also itself provided under an open license so we
can continue our long tradition of relying on other better-funded
companies to pay for the lawyering.

Cheers,

Jeffrey