Community contributions and copyright assignment

Posted Oct 30, 2009 1:55 UTC (Fri) by zooko (guest, #2589)
Parent article: Community contributions and copyright assignment

I wonder about one thing though: you mentioned some people who were uncomfortable with this situation, and I believe you that you really talked to such people over beer. But aren't some other people perfectly happy to contribute to a codebase which might be additionally relicensed under a proprietary licence?

Whenever people contribute work to my project -- Tahoe-LAFS -- I ask them (a) can we please have it under the same terms that we distribute Tahoe-LAFS under (which are Free Software and Open Source), and (b) can we please also have a license to use it however we wish including proprietary relicensing. Also I tell them that we will immediately release their contributions under our Free Software/Open Source licensing terms as soon as their contributions hit our revision control repository.

Everybody so far has said yes to (a) and all but two contributors so far have said yes to (b).

to post comments

Community contributions and copyright assignment

Posted Oct 30, 2009 15:25 UTC (Fri) by dkg (subscriber, #55359) [Link]

but both a and b, as far as i can tell from what you've written, are asking for copyright licenses, not copyright assignment.

That is, with (a) you're asking your contributors for the right to use, modify, and redistribute their code under the same terms that you've offered them for your code. no one is going to balk at that if they're sending you patches already.

and with (b), you seem to again be asking for a *license*, not an assignment. Canonical (according to the article) is actually asking contributors to sign over the proprietorship of the code itself, along with a broad patent grant, all for the privilege of having the code included in their version of the tools.

i think that's a different deal.