We need to wait for a better solution in Jessie+1

Posted Feb 13, 2014 6:56 UTC (Thu) by fandingo (guest, #67019)
In reply to: We need to wait for a better solution in Jessie+1 by roskegg
Parent article: The Debian technical committee vote concludes

There are significant differences between the FSF CLA and the Canonical CLA.

1) The FSF is an American 501(c)(3) charitable organization. If the FSF were to go bankrupt, and the assets liquidated by a court, they cannot be liquidated in a manner inconsistent with the charity's principles. This doctrine is known as cy pres. That means that FSF copyrights could never be sold to an organization that would license them under nonfree terms. Canonical is a commercial company, and those assets could be sold to a company that could relicense the code under proprietary terms, although the current versions would also still exist under the present license.

2) The FSF makes explicit, legally binding promises that they will never relicense (or dual license) the code in a proprietary manner. Canonical does not do so.

3) The Canonical CLA requires that you attest to owning *any* patents that may exist on a work. If a contributor does not know that a contribution infringes a patent, and the holder of that patent sues Canonical, Canonical could seek legal recourse from the contributor. The FSF has no patent attestation clause.

The most that could possibly go wrong with a work handed over to the FSF would be a future license version is at odds with what the contributor intended. Again, the code will always remain free because they promise to do so. It would be more like you contributed when GPLv2 was the newest version and were unhappy that the work is now GPLv3.

The Canonical and FSF CLAs couldn't be more different, and it's not fair to compare them.

We need to wait for a better solution in Jessie+1

Posted Feb 13, 2014 15:57 UTC (Thu) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]

Additionally, the FSF licenses back to you the code you contributed (but only your code!) so that you can reuse it for any purpose (not just under the GPL). The only right you give up is the actual copyright: the license you have gives you back every other right, including to relicense in a different way.

So if you develop some stand-alone code and then assign copyright to the FSF, you can still take that code and use it in your proprietary program if you want (as long as it doesn't derive from any other GPL'd code, that you didn't write, of course).