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No doubt a naive question, but without a CLA, how does the project obtain the IP rights from the contributors necessary to make all the code releasable under an
by nocoiner 3y ago
No doubt a naive question, but without a CLA, how does the project obtain the IP rights from the contributors necessary to make all the code releasable under an open source license (or a future open source license)?
I suppose if every contribution from the very beginning was made predicated on a license that was irrevocably open source and permitted the project maintainers to re-license the project under a future compatible license, then CLAs perhaps wouldn’t be necessary (though doesn’t there still need to be an assignment of the contributor’s inherent copyright rights?), but how often is this the case in practice?
- Macha 3y agoIt requires those contributors to license their contributions under the same license, which as a valid open source license will allow distributing all the contributions under a larger work under that license (or compatible licenses). You're right this makes _changing_ license a lot harder, but to an extent, that's the point, as if you could easily jump from LGPL to Apache or something, there's very few ways you could make that allowance without making it easy to go to full proprietary. The DCO is basically the legal CYA your lawyers might require from contributors saying "I wrote this code any any future contributions I will submit and am happy to license it under X". Notably unlike CLA, it doesn't assign ownership to the recipient or give them permission to arbitrarily relicense.
- nocoiner 3y agoThank you for the explanation - very much appreciated.