Rationale
CLAs can be used to enable vendors to easily pursue legal resolution in the case of copyright disputes, or to relicense products to which contributions have been received from third parties. CLAs are important especially for corporate open source projects under aRelicensing controversy
When a CLA requires a contributor to assign unrestricted republishing rights to the project, contributed code can be relicensed at the discretion of the project, even when the CLA does not assign copyright to the project. Prominent open source advocates regard CLAs as dangerous to open source rights.Examples
In 2019..Our license change is aimed at preventing companies from taking our Elasticsearch and Kibana products and providing them directly as a service without collaborating with us. Our license change comes after years of what we believe to be Amazon/AWS misleading and confusing the community - enough is enough. We’ve tried every avenue available including going through the courts, but with AWS’s ongoing behavior, we have decided to change our license so that we can focus on building products and innovating rather than litigating ..Drew DeVault, a lead developer with a number of open source projects such as Sway, regards this move as a loophole. Both these projects were licensed under a copyleft license, which uses copyright to protect contributions, yet the CLA negates the usefulness of copyright in achieving this protection:
Elasticsearch belongs to its 1,573 contributors, who retain their copyright, and granted Elastic a license to distribute their work without restriction. This is the loophole which Elastic exploited when they decided that Elasticsearch would no longer be open source ../blockquote>
CLAs which restrict relicensing
Project Harmony
Project Harmony was established by Canonical in 2010 to optionally avoid the problems discussed above. It provides a CLA template-builder. Based on choices made, the CLA will allow the contributor to keep copyright and assign rights to the project (as above) but with various restrictions on relicensing: using the template requires choosing one of the mutually-exclusive options, which range in restrictiveness. A real-world example is the Ubuntu project. The CLA leaves copyright with the contributor and allows the project to relicense the code but with a restriction based on the license the contribution was made under:2.3 Outbound License Based on the grant of rights in Sections 2.1 and 2.2, if We include Your Contribution in a Material, We may license the Contribution under any license, including copyleft, permissive, commercial, or proprietary licenses. As a condition on the exercise of this right, We agree to also license the Contribution under the terms of the license or licenses which We are using for the Material on the Submission Date.
Fedora
The Fedora Project formerly required contributors to sign a CLA, either as an organization or as an individual. However, this was retired in 2011 and instead contributors must agree to th
Fedora Project Contributor Agreement
which is not a license agreement and does not include assignment of copyright.
Users
Companies and projects that use CLAs include: * .NET Foundation *Apache Software Foundation The Apache Software Foundation ( ; ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open-source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the ...* Canonical Ltd *Clojure Clojure (, like ''closure'') is a dynamic programming language, dynamic and functional programming, functional dialect (computing), dialect of the programming language Lisp (programming language), Lisp on the Java (software platform), Java platfo ...* Cloud Native Computing Foundation * CyanogenMod *Diaspora A diaspora ( ) is a population that is scattered across regions which are separate from its geographic place of birth, place of origin. The word is used in reference to people who identify with a specific geographic location, but currently resi ...* Digia/ Qt Project *Discourse Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. F ...* Django *Dojo Toolkit Dojo Toolkit (stylized as dōjō toolkit) is an open-source modular JavaScript library (or more specifically JavaScript toolkit) designed to ease the rapid development of cross-platform, JavaScript/ Ajax-based applications and web sites. It was ...* eBay Software Foundation, LLC Subsidiary of eBay *Eclipse An eclipse is an astronomical event which occurs when an astronomical object or spacecraft is temporarily obscured, by passing into the shadow of another body or by having another body pass between it and the viewer. This alignment of three ...*Elastic Elastic is a word often used to describe or identify certain types of elastomer, Elastic (notion), elastic used in garments or stretch fabric, stretchable fabrics. Elastic may also refer to: Alternative name * Rubber band, ring-shaped band of rub ...*Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...* Go *Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...*HashiCorp HashiCorp, Inc. is an American software company with a freemium business model based in San Francisco, California. HashiCorp provides tools and products that enable developers, operators and security professionals to provision, secure, run and co ...* Home Assistant * InfluxDB *Joomla Joomla (), also styled Joomla! (with an exclamation mark) and sometimes abbreviated as J!, is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) for publishing web content on websites. Web content applications include discussion forums, p ...* jQuery *Kubernetes Kubernetes (), also known as K8s is an open-source software, open-source OS-level virtualization, container orchestration (computing), orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Originally designed by Googl ...* OpenBMC * Python *Meteor A meteor, known colloquially as a shooting star, is a glowing streak of a small body (usually meteoroid) going through Earth's atmosphere, after being heated to incandescence by collisions with air molecules in the upper atmosphere, creating a ...*Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...*MuseScore MuseScore Studio (branded as MuseScore before 2024) is a Free and open-source software, free and open-source music notation program for Microsoft Windows, Windows, macOS, and Linux under the Muse Group, which owns the associated online score-s ...* OpenMediaVault *OpenStack OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software pla ...*Puppet A puppet is an object, often resembling a human, animal or Legendary creature, mythical figure, that is animated or manipulated by a person called a puppeteer. Puppetry is an ancient form of theatre which dates back to the 5th century BC in anci ...*Salesforce Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, artificial intelligence, and ap ...* Sangoma * TiddlyWiki * TLDR Pages *W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...*Zend Technologies Zend, formerly Zend Technologies, is a Minneapolis, Minnesota-based software company. The company's products, which include Zend Studio, assist software developers with developing, deploying, and managing PHP-based web applications. The company w ...forZend Framework Laminas Project (formerly Zend Framework or ZF) is an open source, object-oriented web application framework implemented in PHP 7 and licensed under the New BSD License. The framework is basically a collection of professional PHP-based pac ...(1.x series only)
KDE
KDE KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that enable collaborative work on its projects. Its products include the KDE Plasma gra ...uses Free Software Foundation Europe's Fiduciary Licence Agreement of which (FLA-1.2) states in section 3.3: However, it is optional and every contributor is allowed not to assign their copyright to KDE e.V.
See also
* Developer Certificate of Origin *Know your customer Know your customer (KYC) guidelines and regulations in financial services require professionals to verify the identity, suitability, and risks involved with maintaining a business relationship with a customer. The procedures fit within the broad ...* Open-core model
References
External links
Contributor Licence Agreements
from OSS Watch
ContributorAgreements.org
CLA assistant
— enables contributors to sign CLAs from within a pull request {{FOSS Canonical (company) Computer law Copyright law Intellectual property law Licensing