Covenant back

Posted Oct 28, 2009 21:26 UTC (Wed) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510)
Parent article: Community contributions and copyright assignment

FSF has a clear covenant back to the contributor. That's what is lacking from the other agreements.

The covenant that I am using for a project I'm working on promises to continue to release our development under an Open Source license for a period of two years, or to remove the contribution from the work. It doesn't mention commercial licenses, we have the right to issue them or not. It applies to our assigns (any company we sell the asset to).

You have to give people a reason to make the assignment, something more than "we'll put it in our maintained source tree which we might make entirely proprietary tomorrow."