Safe as Milk

Harmony Agreements reach 1.0

July 6, 2011 6:00 pm Dave Neary community, freesoftware

The Harmony agreements reached a significant milestone this week, as they were tagged 1.0 and left the “beta” stage. As someone who has previously taken position regarding contributor licensing agreements, I was asked this week what my thoughts on Harmony are.

First off, let me say that I have not followed the Harmony process closely. Indeed, the process, which was semi-open, but operated under Chatham House Rules (any participant can quote what was said in a meeting, but cannot name the person who said it), is one of the major issues I have seen people take with Harmony. The lack of a clearly identified team taking responsibility for the contents and standing behind the agreement texts is unfortunate, but I think it’s an issue completely independent of their content and the project’s goals.

The goal of the project, as far as I can tell, is to provide a set of templates for people who might want to use a Contributor Licensing Agreement (CLA). As far as it goes, that is fine. Where there is a danger is if the existence of such a template is used to encourage the adoption of CLAs (including copyright assignment) as a “best practice” to be followed.

A CLA is actually a conflation of two very different things: the first is asking a contributor to certify that they have the right to make their contribution (that it is original work, that they agree to the project’s license, that their employer has given permission for the contribution, etc). The Mozilla project gets their contributors to sign a similar document upon becoming committers, to ensure that they perform due diligence before accepting a patch from a proposer. So this aspect of CLAs is sensible and useful for most projects.

The second part of CLAs is copyright licensing or assignment. This creates an asymmetric situation in the project where a central copyright holder has the power to make certain decisions for the project, including for some code which they did not write. As I said previously, copyright assignment has its down sides: it will prevent (or, at best, make much more difficult) the formation of a diverse developer community around the core of your project. If that is part of what you want to achieve, then you should be aware of that. However, if you are happy to be basically the sole contributor to the project core, and the ownership of all of the code in that core is useful for other goals, then copyright assignment may well be appropriate for your project.

Harmony does attempt to make copyright assignment more acceptable by including a licensing promise in some variants. This is fine. I don’t think I would sign such an agreement, but I am sure that the promise that contributions will always be available under a certain license may be enough to reassure other potential contributors.

The main “flaw” which others have identified in Harmony is the lack of a patent promise from the assignee to the assigner. I kind of think that this is a red herring, because such a promise should really be explicit in the license under which the contributor got the software in the first place. Having such a promise in a CLA really doesn’t feel necessary or useful.

Overall, I’m sure that some people will find Harmony agreements useful – they will hopefully save communication time between projects with CLAs and developers, and lawyer fees for companies considering the adoption of a CLA. Yet, my priority will continue to be to question the assumptions which lead people to adopt a CLA without fully thinking through the consequences.

Do you really need a CLA to achieve your objectives? Is it, in fact, harmful to some of what you want to achieve? At the end of the day, my position remains the same: the goal should not be to write a better CLA, it should be to figure out whether we can avoid one altogether, and figure out how to create and thrive in a vibrant developer community.