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

Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements? (ComputerWorld)

Posted Aug 27, 2010 16:15 UTC (Fri) by trasz (guest, #45786)
Parent article: Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements? (ComputerWorld)

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

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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.