Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements? (ComputerWorld) [LWN.net]

Simon Phipps ponders contributor agreements, and copyright assignment policies in particular in ComputerWorld. "Even with these benefits available, there are many communities that choose not to aggregate their copyrights - notably the Linux kernel, GNOME, Apache and Mozilla communities. The recent policy and guidelines on copyright assignment by the GNOME Foundations are especially worth reading. Having diverse copyright ownership leads to a deeper mutual trust and an assurance that the playing-field remains level. Insisting on copyright aggregation is one of the more certain ways a company can ensure the open source community it is seeding remains small and lacking co-developers."

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Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements? (ComputerWorld)

Posted Aug 27, 2010 16:15 UTC (Fri) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link] (5 responses)

What about mandatory copyright assignment required by Free Software Foundation for certain projects?

Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements? (ComputerWorld)

Posted Aug 27, 2010 18:24 UTC (Fri) by dmaxwell (guest, #14010) [Link] (2 responses)

I would imagine that many don't or limit contributions to FSF projects for just that reason. Still the FSF are committed to their Free Software principals and can be trusted not to release proprietary forks or even relicensed forks. I have my differences with the FSF but would be more comfortable relinquishing copyright to them as opposed to Canonical or Oracle. You can at least trust their commitment to keeping the code free within the parameters they define as free. A private corporation could do anything and after a bad quarter or two probably would.

Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements? (ComputerWorld)

Posted Aug 29, 2010 15:29 UTC (Sun) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (1 responses)

You don't have to trust the FSF at all.

The Foundation promises that all distribution of the Work, or of any work "based on the Work," that takes place under the control of the Foundation or its assignees, shall be on terms that explicitly and perpetually permit anyone possessing a copy of the work to which the terms apply, and possessing accurate notice of these terms, to redistribute copies of the work to anyone on the same terms. These terms shall not restrict which members of the public copies may be distributed to. These terms shall not require a member of the public to pay any royalty to the Foundation or to anyone else for any permitted use of the work they apply to, or to communicate with the Foundation or its agents in any way either when redistribution is performed or on any other occasion.

If they change it to a non-open source licence, the copyright reverts to you. I suppose you need to trust your government to enforce that, which may or may not be a problem :)

Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements? (ComputerWorld)

Posted Sep 3, 2010 18:38 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

If they change it to a non-open source license, the copyright reverts to you.

Are you sure? Because nothing in the paragraph you took the trouble to quote says that. When a party to a contract breaks a promise of this kind, it doesn't undo the contract or even any promise by the other party -- it generally just means the breaching party owes the other one money.

Another thing to worry about: As a contract lawyer I am frequently frustrated by clients who say, "there's no reason to put that in writing, we trust each other to do what's right, and we have a separate understanding on this." I have a number of rebuttals to that, but the easiest one is: "you won't necessarily be dealing with each other." You could be dealing with his heir or creditor, or worst of all, bankruptcy trustee. A bankruptcy trustee's duty is to get every penny he can for creditors, to the limits of the law. "Do what's right" doesn't enter into it.

I'm not saying anything about the FSF or this copyright assignment contract, because I don't know -- just talking about the general trust issue.

Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements? (ComputerWorld)

Posted Aug 30, 2010 8:39 UTC (Mon) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link] (1 responses)

[[ What about mandatory copyright assignment required by Free Software Foundation for certain projects? ]]

Well, GDC, the D compiler which use GCC as a backend, cannot become a part of GCC because even though the D frontend is opensource, its copyright isn't assigned to the FSF.
This nearly killed the project and hinder greatly the distribution of this project in Linux distributions..
I think that the FSF reasons for this mandatory copyright assignment are really specious:
1) as seen by successful lawsuit made by projects which doesn't use mandatory copyright assignment, it's not needed for lawsuits (even though it probably help)
2) if the FSF wants to relicense some code in an incompatible manner, they would loose the functionnality provided, so *what*?
We're talking about a frontend for one language, not something which is a core part of GCC..

Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements? (ComputerWorld)

Posted Aug 31, 2010 10:27 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Various uproar over various FOSS projects in the past few years have nicely illustrated a fundamental truth: If your new version of a program loses functionality that the old version had, then the people who needed / wanted that functionality don't care how awesome the new version is.

Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements? (ComputerWorld)

Posted Aug 27, 2010 16:32 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

An article specifically requested to be written at the last Harmony Project meeting. Look at that!

We need more participants of the Project Harmony discussion to get out and talking about their personal opinions about these issues in the context of the communities they are implicitly representing and getting feedback from their constituencies. For some people that will be personal blogs... other it will be laypress media blogs(like this article).. and for others it will be a discussion inside their own institution's contributor discussion channels. The an informed public discussion _must_ happen.

-jef

Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements? (ComputerWorld)

Posted Aug 27, 2010 19:18 UTC (Fri) by nicooo (guest, #69134) [Link] (1 responses)

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market

> The theory holds that within an ideal free market, property rights are voluntarily exchanged at a price arranged solely by the mutual consent of sellers and buyers. By definition, buyers and sellers do not coerce each other, in the sense that they obtain each other's property rights without the use of physical force, threat of physical force, or fraud, nor are they coerced by a third party (such as by government via transfer payments)[1] and they engage in trade simply because they both consent and believe that what they are getting is worth more than or as much as what they give up.

There's nothing special about contributor agreements, other than the fact that the "open source community" is an ideal free market.

Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements? (ComputerWorld)

Posted Aug 31, 2010 2:26 UTC (Tue) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link]

We need a IANAE abbreviation ("I am not an economist"). Because I am, and it is obvious that free software is not an "ideal free market".

Consider these things particular to free software:

- The existence of positive externalities which are not captured in the price. This is the very point of the saying "free as in freedom, not free as in beer".

- The inability to transfer ownership. The difficulty of doing that for projects lacking contributor agreements is the very point of the article. Related to that is the ease by which projects can be "forked" -- that is, the assets of a transfer of ownership may not end up being transferred whatever the paperwork says.

Consider these attributes of software markets in general:

- Price-setting in software isn't really about supply and demand, since supply has such a low margin cost that it can be near infinite. That oddity of software markets makes free software possible.

- The barriers to entry formed by the user's investment in learning to use a particular product. This "user lock in" has both helped and hindered the spread of free software.

So let's move on from a 1960s view of economics and its attitude that a free market is the only sort of market worth having. Modern economics is much more about exploring the world as it is, rather than making a complex world fit into one idealised model.

Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements? (ComputerWorld)

Posted Sep 21, 2010 14:50 UTC (Tue) by pphaneuf (guest, #23480) [Link]

I find it very annoying how copyright assignments and contributor agreements (which is a general term, and can have any number of things in it) are confused. Apache has a contributor agreement, which essentially says that a contributor licenses the Apache Foundation the right to their code (duh), holds you up in the matter that you're allowed to do that, and that if you have any patents related to this, you're allowing their free use for the matter of this project (I'm vastly abbreviating here, read the real thing for the proper details).

But most importantly, you keep all of your copyrights, no assignments. Yet, it seems to me to be a much more useful agreement, for the patent bits, for example. A project that finds itself copyright owner of a piece of code that is covered by a patent doesn't really have much of use, doesn't it?