Relax Terms of Use / Drop Terms of Use requirement for GitHub comments

some-java-user-99206970363698485155 at vodafonemail.de some-java-user-99206970363698485155 at vodafonemail.de
Sat Feb 26 00:40:23 UTC 2022


Hello,
could you please consider relaxing the Terms of Use, or at least reconsider whether interaction on GitHub (e.g. pull request
comments) really has to require Terms of Use agreement?

The current Terms of Use (https://openjdk.java.net/legal/tou/terms) points 4.d, e, k all mention that by contributing you grant
Oracle a "royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive and fully sub-licensable right and license" to the 
submissions. While I acknowledge the great and important role Oracle plays in the development of the OpenJDK, I don't really
see why this has to imply giving Oracle the right to do close to 'anything' with the submissions, when one only wants to 
contribute to the OpenJDK (and I am a bit surprised that none of the other companies contributing to the OpenJDK have an issue 
with this).

Related to this is also the enforcement of agreeing to the Terms of Use to be able to interact on GitHub with the OpenJDK 
development. I don't know of any other project / company doing development on GitHub which is that restrictive. Sure, some
others require you to sign a Contributor License Agreement, but interacting (such as writing a pull request comment) does not
require this. By enforcing the ToU, you risk to lose potential contributors, because really, who is keen to keep contributing
after beeing greeted with a large ToU when merely adding a GitHub comment? (at least there is a "Plain-English summary" version
though).

The current implementation of this enforcement can also be rather disruptive (for both the comment author and the other users
involved in the pull request), as seen in
- https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/pull/3402#issuecomment-934771740
- https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/pull/5762#issuecomment-934130809
- https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/pull/5933#discussion_r734980808
- https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/pull/6512#discussion_r755630515
- https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/pull/4103#discussion_r637965569

And it has its flaws, see SKARA-1210 and SKARA-1211.
(For what it's worth there is also a small mistake in the comment message; in 'Please Use "Add GitHub user <USER> for the 
summary.' after <USER> the closing double quote '"' is missing; and maybe "Use" should not be capitalized)

Kind regards



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