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OpenOffice.org and contributor agreementsOpenOffice.org and contributor agreementsPosted May 21, 2011 19:19 UTC (Sat) by pphaneuf (guest, #23480)In reply to: OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements by webmink Parent article: OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements
I'm not sure what "sublicensing" means precisely, but at any rate, the Apache license (which is used with most Google projects, I think, and the Google CLA is pretty much the same as the Apache one) isn't a copyleft, it's more similar to a BSD in spirit, and you could always make a proprietary fork of those, so this is nothing new, CLA or not.
If you're a strong proponent of copyleft, then this might not be acceptable, but is the CLA making it any worse?
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OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements Posted May 22, 2011 13:42 UTC (Sun) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]
Well, IANAL but 'sub-licensing' means that any right you give Google, that they have the right to licence those to others.
If you look at the GPL, you'll see it talks about sub-licensing but says it's unnecessary since the GPL gives the receiver all the rights of the GPL from the original author so there is nothing to sub-license. So AFAICS it has no effect on strong-copyleft either.
It's certainly not assigning copyright. I don't think it can because in several jurisdictions you can't do that with an electronic form anyway. My theory is that the Google CLA is designed to be able to cover anything, not just open-source stuff, and that its effect on non-open source stuff is more profound. Documentation you submit comes to mind.
Still, I'd like someone with legal training to actually write something (you know, with citations and research) about the interaction between contributor agreements and copyright licences, because it vaguely feels like a dual-licensing arrangement, which always seemed like a dodgy part of copyright law to me anyway.
OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements Posted May 22, 2011 23:26 UTC (Sun) by pphaneuf (guest, #23480) [Link]
I just took a side-by-side read of the Apache and Google "individual" CLAs, and it seems to be almost identical, mostly changing "Foundation" with "Google", and I think the Apache one is older? So I doubt it's authors had much thought for non-open-source? I might be wrong here, this is just conjecture.
I'd be interested as well in such a article/paper.
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