Agreeing with Project terms [LWN.net]

Agreeing with Project terms

Posted May 23, 2011 16:37 UTC (Mon) by southey (subscriber, #9466)
In reply to: OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements by iabervon
Parent article: OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

I find your argument rather moot because sending code means that you already agree to the project's terms including licensing. Otherwise the Project would not (or should not) accept it because it would change the terms of the project.

Of course, if you do not agree with the Project's terms then you should only contribute what you can afford to lose. As was very evident in this article, if you want the code back then reassigning copyrights is one indication that you are less likely to get the code back under favorable terms.

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Agreeing with Project terms

Posted May 23, 2011 18:15 UTC (Mon) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

Sending code only generally means that you must have agreed to whatever license grants you the right to prepare and distribute that code. The assumption that someone distributing a modification to a BSD-licensed work agrees to distribute the modification under the BSD license is no more safe that the assumption that the person distributing the modification agrees to buy the maintainers beer. As such, projects probably shouldn't accept contributions without some sort of actual agreement, because they can't tell whether that would change the terms of the project or not.

FWIW, I think that copyright assignments are a bad idea in general, which is part of why the only contribution I've made to a GNU project is one where I convinced the maintainer that my change wasn't copyrightable (IIRC, I removed a bogus clause from an expression in make 3.79). But I would happily agree to allow a project to sublicense whatever I send them under the licenses they apply to the releases they make, particularly if the wording of this agreement has gone through public review by community lawyers.

Note that Fedora is actually planning to require contributors to sign an agreement to let Fedora use contributions in the obvious way. They feel that, even though they aren't asking for anything special (like copyright assignment), it's worth having the agreement in place.

Agreeing with Project terms

Posted May 24, 2011 0:04 UTC (Tue) by pphaneuf (guest, #23480) [Link]

What I find confusing is that the author of the article, in a comment stated that whether a CLA required copyright assignment or not. I want to understand whether the Apache CLA is one of the "evil CLAs", or what Mr Phipps calls a "participation agreement". It doesn't look to me like the Apache CLA is granting the Apache Foundation special powers, but then, I'm not a legal expert. What it looks like is that they get the power to sublicense (not relicense) under the same license they use for the rest of the project, which kinds of make sense to me (someone will download and use Apache software, hopefully!).

Of course, Mr Phipps goal of protecting against a company just turning around and selling your code as part of a proprietary product might be a bit moot with a license such as Apache 2.0, because with that license, right from the start, one could just repackage it, and sell it without providing code. So if you're using a BSD-style license in the first place, clearly you're fine with some odd losses of "control".

Agreeing with Project terms

Posted May 25, 2011 19:39 UTC (Wed) by webmink (guest, #47180) [Link]

Apache's agreement is a CLA but appears (to my eyes at least) redundant as it delivers no more than the Apache license itself. As such I would regard it as unhelpful since it legitimises the use of CLAs without delivering a significant community benefit.

Agreeing with Project terms

Posted May 25, 2011 22:08 UTC (Wed) by pphaneuf (guest, #23480) [Link]

Ok, so if I understand this correctly, it confuses the issue (it certainly confused me!), which is harmful in a broader sense, but if I sign it, it shouldn't be harmful to myself personally.

At least, it is no worse than putting out my contributions under the non-copyleft, BSD-style Apache 2.0 license...

Thanks!

Agreeing with Project terms

Posted May 27, 2011 20:45 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

Sending code only generally means that you must have agreed to whatever license grants you the right to prepare and distribute that code.

A copyright license isn't something one agrees to -- it's a unilateral thing: the author grants a license; the copier uses it to copy (prepare and distribute).

And it's certainly possible to prepare and distribute without complying with conditions of any license, i.e. not having a license at all. It's a copyright infringement, but it can happen.

So it's even more important than you say for projects accepting code to get an explicit license from the author to distribute it. Plus whatever assurance they can get that nobody else has copyright without licensing the code to the project.

As such, projects probably shouldn't accept contributions without some sort of actual agreement

But an agreement isn't really necessary.