[Harmony-Drafting] some comments

Allison Randal allison at lohutok.net
Thu Feb 16 21:30:25 UTC 2012


On 02/16/2012 10:56 AM, villalu at gtlaw.com wrote:
> I finally sat down to try and *use* Harmony for a client; some comments
> from that process:
>  
> 0) It is, I think, a solid improvement over the de facto standard
> (Apache). I wish I'd been able to be involved more, and my sincere
> thanks go out to the folks who did do the heavy lifting.

Thanks from all of us. :)

> 1) The template generator has some issues. In particular, it says "Would
> you like to add a media license." This language implies that the media
> license is optional; and indeed, the generator is happy to spit out an
> agreement even if you do not select a media license. That results in an
> agreement that says:
> 
>     In addition, We may use the following licenses for Media in the
>     Contribution: (including any right toadopt any future version of a
>     license if permitted).
> 
> That's obviously nonsensical; it would be better if the generator
> removed the language altogether if no license was selected (which I
> think is the common case for most projects).

This is definitely a bug. There's code in place to drop the Media
license clause if none is selected, so I'll dig in and figure out why
it's not working. Was that in the generated PDF or HTML (or both)? The
code paths are different for each, so a bug in one format of output may
not affect another.

The selector is a public github project, I'll track these as issues there:

https://github.com/allisonrandal/harmony-selector

(BTW, I haven't specified the license on that code yet. I assume we want
a FLOSS license, I'm open to the general consensus of the Harmony
drafting group in picking which one.)

> The same problem happens if no jurisdiction is selected, which is
> obviously more damaging:
> 
>     This Agreement will be governed by and construed in accordance with
>     the laws of excluding itsconflicts of law provisions.
> 
> I'd strongly recommend that be fixed- either the form should do
> something sensible (remove the choice of law provision?) when no
> jurisdiction is selected, or the form should refuse to create a form
> with no jurisdiction. The current behavior could result in agreements
> that are really quite problematic.

During the drafting process, the strong consensus was that jurisdiction
was not optional. So, I'd say the fix here is to bounce back to the form
with an error message. Do others agree?

> 2) In Section 5, "in no event will you or us be liable" should be "in no
> event will you or we be liable" (or better "in no event will either
> party") shouldn't it? Not horribly damaging, so probably not worth a
> formal revision, but perhaps something to file away for whenever some
> other change necessitates a 1.0.1.

Good suggestion for the next round of revision.

> 3) It may be too early for this, but it would give people reassurance if
> there were a "who is using the harmony agreements" page somewhere on the
> website. (It may in fact be very early; Google can't find the phrase "IN
> NO EVENT WILL YOU OR US BE LIABLE FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS" anywhere
> except the Harmony site, but I know some projects don't publish their
> CLAs so that may be misleading.)

I'm happy to put up the page. I don't know all the current active users,
but I'd certainly be interested to see the full list. We're not really
doing much at the moment to encourage "trackbacks" from users. We could
do more, along the lines of "We'd love to hear from you, and we'll
gladly post your logo and a link to your project on X page of the
Harmony website."

Thanks for the feedback!

Allison


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