Agreeing with Project terms [LWN.net]

Agreeing with Project terms

Posted May 24, 2011 0:04 UTC (Tue) by pphaneuf (guest, #23480)
In reply to: Agreeing with Project terms by iabervon
Parent article: OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

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".

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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!