4 ms·
Good argumentation from very faulty assumptions. The Developer Certificate of Origin is not a contributor license agreement. (See https://writing.kemitchell.co
by kemitchell 4y ago
Good argumentation from very faulty assumptions.
The Developer Certificate of Origin is not a contributor license agreement. (See https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/07/02/DCO-Not-CLA https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/07/02/DCO-Not-CLA.) It has no part that clearly says the contributor grants a license for their contribution, or on what terms.
This is the main disadvantage of the DCO, especially in non-GPL projects. Not that it "encourages distributed ownership". A contributor license agreement doesn't change who owns any copyrights, either. That's a copyright assignment. FSF's copyright assignment paperwork isn't a contributor license agreement, either. Assignment != License.
License grants in CLAs are often in different, broader terms than open source licenses for several reasons. For one, many open source licenses are ancient, without clear and complete license grants by today's standards. Second, part of the point of a CLA in many cases is to enable project stewards to change or legally upgrade license terms in the future. CLAs give them all the rights we can think of to license on whatever terms, so they're not caught short.
There is no reason CLAs for a project can't be shared openly.
If temptation to abuse of power were inevitable, we would see a lot more individual contributors to open projects who retained ownership of their copyrights suing project users about meaningless license violations for monetary settlements.
Companies like Elastic have changed to new licenses for future development. None that I'm aware of has tried to change the license terms for previously released open work retroactively, and there are serious legal questions about whether this is even possible or practical. Bloggers and tweeters sow a lot of unfounded fear about "evil corporate relicensing" by using loose terms that can imply, for those ready to see it, that there are releases floating around out there with Apache 2.0 license notices that aren't actually Apache 2.0 licensed anymore. What actually changes is that ongoing development by those companies moves to new terms, and folks interested in continuing development under the old license terms either do or don't step up to "fork" from the last release under those terms.