Perens: The Covenant - A New Approach to Open Source Cooperation

It seems to me that this is missing an important motivation for developers: many developers want to implement a particular feature so they themselves can use that feature. Consider, for example, a developer who has added a redundancy feature to a database so that the web site they run has better availability; their primary goal is to run the site with a database with this feature. To the extent that these developers expect to get a benefit from contributing the code to the upstream project, it is to reduce the maintenance burden (ultimately by developers considering that to be normal functionality and simply not introducing conflicts). In this situation, the covenant would ensure the worst of all possibilities in the situation where the company took the project proprietary: not only would the developer not have access to the source of future versions, but these future versions would not work for the developer, since the feature would have to be removed. Furthermore, there is a danger in the company then owning the copyright on the implementation of this feature, if the developer decides to add the feature to a different project (particularly if the other projects that it would make sense to add the feature to require copyright assignment, so simply having a license to the original implementation is not sufficient).