Richard Fontana

While I agree that developers should "understand what they're signing away", a point you've made elsewhere, I think this itself points to a problem. Maximalist contributor agreements typically contain provisions that are not customary in outbound FLOSS licenses. I believe that ethical concerns are potentially raised when an individual developer, likely without access to counsel, is expected to sign an agreement containing unfamiliar legalese carrying significant legal consequences that run to the benefit of some more powerful and sophisticated entity. In this concern I do not think I am in disagreement with Canonical's lawyers, actually. I do not agree that Harmony provides a solution, let alone a good solution, to this problem.

Regarding the issue of "nasty players", I simply don't see this as a significant problem in open source, certainly not enough to justify a fundamental alteration in prevailing models of legal governance. If the issue is really a matter of (mis)perception by corporations initiating open source projects, perhaps those corporations are not ready to get involved in open source in that capacity (and should focus on being contributors to upstream projects first).

Fedora does more than just aggregate software packages - the FPCA may cover documentation, wiki edits, artwork, as well as RPM spec files. However, I agree that a distro project doesn't need a contributor agreement, and I'm glad you have made that point. Perhaps the main reason why Fedora has the FPCA at all is historical: it used to have another one (the old Fedora CLA, based closely on the Apache Software Foundation's ICLA), and the FPCA originated as an effort to correct the flaws of the old agreement. I have heard a number of past critics of the old Fedora CLA express approval of the FPCA.

Although I was the principal drafter of the FPCA, today it strikes me as a bit heavyweight (I wouldn't say "extraordinarily" as it is still a remarkably minimalist contributor agreement :). I was at an earlier stage of my thinking on this subject during the main period of my work on the FPCA with Tom Callaway.