Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 17, 2011 21:21 UTC (Tue) by stefanha (subscriber, #55072)
Parent article: Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

We're missing details on what exactly contributor agreements give companies without which they cannot get involved in open source. On each new paragraph of this article I hope to find the meat of why Mark Shuttleworth is championing contributor agreements but an explanation never comes. It is hard to have a real discussion without the logic behind why contributor agreements are necessary and why now.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 27, 2011 7:15 UTC (Fri) by AdamW (subscriber, #48457) [Link]

to be clear, there's a big difference between contributor agreements and copyright assignment. The former without the latter is pretty uncontroversial: any project needs a solid legal basis on which to use contributions, and a standardized agreement that just formally says 'you can use the stuff I send you under these licenses' is a convenient way of doing that, for both parties. Projects also benefit from the ability to relicense to another (improved) F/OSS license, and contributor agreements can make this much easier, obviating the need to track down every last contributor and ask permission to relicense, including the one who moved to a cave in the Himalayas a decade ago.

What's much more controversial are contributor agreements which require copyright assignment: not just you keeping copyright of your code but granting specific rights to it to the project in question, but you actually assigning ownership of the contribution to the project.

It's important not to conflate the two.