Kuhn: Why your project doesn't need a contributor licensing agreement [LWN.net]

Kuhn: Why your project doesn't need a contributor licensing agreement

Posted Jun 15, 2014 16:15 UTC (Sun) by smurf (subscriber, #17840)
In reply to: Kuhn: Why your project doesn't need a contributor licensing agreement by dakas
Parent article: Kuhn: Why your project doesn't need a contributor licensing agreement

Strictly speaking, the FSF only needs one contributor's assignment / exclusive license / take-your-pick in order to go after a violator. (NB: Said contribution probably should be nontrivial.)

The FSF has way more than that. It does not need copyright assignments from every contributor ever; besides, some people are unable to sign one (try to get something like that ACKed by any largish company's legal dept. if you don't believe me).

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Kuhn: Why your project doesn't need a contributor licensing agreement

Posted Jun 15, 2014 19:04 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

It does not need copyright assignments from every contributor ever; besides, some people are unable to sign one (try to get something like that ACKed by any largish company's legal dept. if you don't believe me).

The fact that it's hard to convince “any largish company's legal dept” to sign an agreement is reason for the agreement, not against it. If you know that in your jurisdiction a company has no right for your work made at home then it should be easy for you to sign agreement as individual and get some kind of formal approval from you company legal dept (it should know that it could not control you, too). If, on the other hand, your jurisdiction makes it possible for the company to control such agreements then obviously without agreement you could not contribute: company will be able to claim later that you've contributed their IP without their content and FSF will be forced to rip out such contributions. Which may be problematic if they are used by many other pieces of software.