
Improving Clojure Contrib - fogus
http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/c40ff3e876b4b370/f6fcb96fd695635c?show_docid=f6fcb96fd695635c
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grogers
What pushed me away from contributing patches and improvements was the
Contributor Agreement. I'm sure others feel the same as it is a pretty large
barrier to entry.

Making each clojure.contrib.* library more independent makes sense, but it
makes even less sense now to keep everything under CA. As Rich said, it is not
a standard library - it isn't strictly affiliated with clojure proper.

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scott_s
What's wrong with it? I just looked it up: <http://clojure.org/contributing>

It seems to be a cover-my-bases way of saying "If you contribute, we have
joint-ownership of the code." Which is, I think, reasonable if you're going to
_contribute_ code to a project.

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technomancy
> What's wrong with it?

"Here, I've got this simple three-line improvement to make."

"Whoa; back up, have you got a CA in?"

"What's that?"

"Um... OK, do you have a fax machine? This might take a few days/weeks."

Even the FSF with their high level of paranoia and many lawyers doesn't
require copyright assignment for patches under 20 lines.

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scott_s
To be clear, you have no objections with the content of the agreement, just
that it's friction.

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technomancy
I don't care whether copyright assignment is given or not, my objection is to
anything getting in the way of improving Clojure. Somewhat frequently you see
people come into the IRC channel with a simple bugfix being told their fixes
can't be used right now. Often they never get around to resubmitting them once
the paperwork has landed. First impressions count for a lot, and I suspect the
initial brush-off leads to people being less likely to contribute when they do
have something more substantial they could do.

Of course, in the case of Clojure copyright assignment is hardly the biggest
impediment to getting patches applied, so maybe this is moot. It is
interesting to note that Clojure has only had 33 external contributors since
switching to git in the middle of last year, while my own project Leiningen
has had over fifty despite being a younger, much lower-profile, and less
interesting project:

<http://www.ohloh.net/p/clojure/contributors>

<http://www.ohloh.net/p/leiningen/contributors>

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timmorgan
This is great. The contrib collection had this noob a bit confused when I
started, thinking it was some sort of standard lib. Then I found it to be a
bit less stable and organized than most standard libraries (but chock full of
goodies!).

I like the approach of using GitHub and making each piece its own repo.

