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Shouldn't CLA mitigate all/most of your concerns as the maintainer? Can you elaborate on your concerns?

• tfehring 5y ago
  My concern is that the person who agrees to the CLA (generally the individual programmer) may not actually be authorized to assign ownership of the IP - since if they're subject to an IP assignment provision, they don't own the IP to begin with, their employer does. CLAs generally (if not universally) include clauses addressing this. For example, Google's [0]: > You represent that you are legally entitled to grant the above license. If your employer(s) has rights to intellectual property that you create that includes your Contributions, you represent that you have received permission to make Contributions on behalf of that employer, that your employer has waived such rights for your Contributions to Google, or that your employer has executed a separate Corporate CLA with Google. But I'm not sure I trust engineers to read and adhere to the fine print. And "he told us he had the right to assign the IP" isn't a defense - if it were, you could get out of an IP assignment clause in general just by lying and saying you're not subject to one. [0] https://cla.developers.google.com/about/google-individual https://cla.developers.google.com/about/google-individual