Yeah, these got popular with GitHub on bigger projects. It’s like lawyers for these organizations aren’t sufficiently well versed enough in the laws around open

Yeah, these got popular with GitHub on bigger projects. It’s like lawyers for these organizations aren’t sufficiently well versed enough in the laws around open source to realize they’re already protected, so they apply contracts law, which is what they learned in law school. What’s kind of ironic is that I wonder if these are even valid contracts. Contracts are required to have 5 characteristics: an offer, acceptance, consideration, competency, and legal intent. Open source agreements that require disclosing source code changes may lack the ability to give consideration as you are, in a sense, required to contribute changes back. Consideration means you get something in return for signing a contract. The thing you get for signing ULAs and the like are the ability to use a product. What are you getting in return for signing these agreements? The ability to contribute? Already that seems like a pretty weak consideration, but when you add in that you are required by some licenses to disclose changes and I think these contracts are completely void of any legal basis.