Potential legal issue

Posted Aug 17, 2023 17:00 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104)
Parent article: HashiCorp's license change

The old Contributor License Agreement said at the very top:

We require our external contributors to sign a Contributor License Agreement ("CLA") in order to ensure that our projects remain licensed under Free and Open Source licenses

It appears that HashiCorp didn't fulfill their part of the agreement but kept the benefits. I hope lawyers have a closer look.

Potential legal issue

Posted Aug 17, 2023 17:51 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (2 responses)

> We require our external contributors to sign a Contributor License Agreement ("CLA") in order to ensure that our projects remain licensed under Free and Open Source licenses

That sentence alone is (or rather, was) somewhat suspicious IMHO, because you definitely do not need a CLA to ensure that.

Potential legal issue

Posted Aug 17, 2023 22:18 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] (1 responses)

It sounds like a promise to me. You assign us the copyright, we keep the code open source.

Potential legal issue

Posted Aug 18, 2023 6:11 UTC (Fri) by timrichardson (subscriber, #72836) [Link]

Most of the sneaky CLAs do not require the contributor to reassign copyright; they grant the receiving entity various indemnities, over patents and claims about actual authorship and the right of the submitter to claim ownership of the contribution, which seem fair enough, and they grant a licence to the code which includes allowing the recipient to distribute the submission under any other licence. So you keep your copyright, upon which open source licences are built, but you have effectively relaxed the power of your copyright to undermine the open source licence. I don't think projects should be allowed to claim to be open source with CLAs like this. I wish GitHub would surface the CLA aspect; it makes the licence highly visible, but it's not the full story.