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Does is require a CLA? That's the deal breaker for me as distributed license ownership is one of the most important ways free software is kept free. Changing th

Does is require a CLA? That's the deal breaker for me as distributed license ownership is one of the most important ways free software is kept free. Changing the license of a large free software project should be hard/impossible.

the_mitsuhiko 2y ago
The FSL and other licenses are not special when it comes to how the contributions are managed. In theory every contribution needs a CLA or something similar regardless of where you contribute it accept contributions. That most projects don’t require that is typically a result of “it doesn’t matter until it matters”.
- eikenberry 2y ago
  Not requiring a CLA doesn't necessarily mean you just didn't think of it... you can not require a CLA on purpose. To spread ownership around to enough people to make it much, much harder to change the license. To make the license as sticky as possible.
  - the_mitsuhiko 2y ago
    I think a big reason that CLAs are less common nowadays is Github's TOS which explicitly require you to acknowledge that you contribute under the same license: > Whenever you add Content to a repository containing notice of a license, you license that Content under the same terms, and you agree that you have the right to license that Content under those terms. If you have a separate agreement to license that Content under different terms, such as a contributor license agreement, that agreement will supersede. While one can argue that even in the absence of that notice, that might be how it works, there is no real legal agreement to that. You could legally walk back on your contribution and claim that you never gave a license to it. I have seen that happen once indirectly when a contributor informed me that the company that they worked for did not allow the person to contribute.
    - eikenberry 2y ago
      Having a CLA like this would seem to cover your ass better legaly-speaking, but I'm not sure if either case has been tested in court and so am not sure if it really does help or not. I've never personally seen a CLA where you weren't signing away ownership, where you were just stipulating that your contributions were under the same license as the rest of the code. Do you know of any cases of this? I'd be curious to see them.
thayne 2y ago
I think the users of these licenses would either have to have a CLA, or have the license explicitly name the company that gets the special rights to make commercial products from it. Otherwise contributors might be able to claim the company isn't complying with its own license.

the_mitsuhiko 2y ago

The FSL and other licenses are not special when it comes to how the contributions are managed. In theory every contribution needs a CLA or something similar regardless of where you contribute it accept contributions. That most projects don’t require that is typically a result of “it doesn’t matter until it matters”.

eikenberry 2y ago
Not requiring a CLA doesn't necessarily mean you just didn't think of it... you can not require a CLA on purpose. To spread ownership around to enough people to make it much, much harder to change the license. To make the license as sticky as possible.
- the_mitsuhiko 2y ago
  I think a big reason that CLAs are less common nowadays is Github's TOS which explicitly require you to acknowledge that you contribute under the same license: > Whenever you add Content to a repository containing notice of a license, you license that Content under the same terms, and you agree that you have the right to license that Content under those terms. If you have a separate agreement to license that Content under different terms, such as a contributor license agreement, that agreement will supersede. While one can argue that even in the absence of that notice, that might be how it works, there is no real legal agreement to that. You could legally walk back on your contribution and claim that you never gave a license to it. I have seen that happen once indirectly when a contributor informed me that the company that they worked for did not allow the person to contribute.
  - eikenberry 2y ago
    Having a CLA like this would seem to cover your ass better legaly-speaking, but I'm not sure if either case has been tested in court and so am not sure if it really does help or not. I've never personally seen a CLA where you weren't signing away ownership, where you were just stipulating that your contributions were under the same license as the rest of the code. Do you know of any cases of this? I'd be curious to see them.

thayne 2y ago

I think the users of these licenses would either have to have a CLA, or have the license explicitly name the company that gets the special rights to make commercial products from it. Otherwise contributors might be able to claim the company isn't complying with its own license.