101–110 of 196 posts
I would rather be able to fix a bug or provide a feature to software my company paid for rather than hoping they'll fix/implement it sometime soon, or building some hack around it, if it makes my life easier.
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> I did not say that, nor do I believe it, nor is it really related. What is the practical difference between contributing under a CLA to a project that's currently under an open-source license and contributing under a non-copyleft open-source license while retaining the copyright yourself? In both cases the project's ability to "go closed source" seems substantially the same, so it seems to me that your arguments ag…
It entirely depends on the CLA. But the CLAs I've seen referenced generally only do one thing: give the entity who issued the CLA the rights to do pretty much whatever they want with your code (one key right is often the ability to go closed source or otherwise re-license the work without the author's permission) while usually granting the author no additional rights or consideration. It is often as close as you can…
Indeed, but submitting a contribution under an MIT-style permissive license grants that entity a very similar set of rights.
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>not all open source is FOSS >This is not the case of all open source licenses. false. open source is literally just a friendlier name and otherwise rebranding of free software. all open source is free software and all free software is open source. if you are contributing to FOSS qua FOSS, then you want it to remain FOSS. FOSS refers to that software which guarantees your right to change it, so if you are making chan…
> false. open source is literally just a friendlier name and otherwise rebranding of free software. This is not how anyone I have ever talked to thinks about it. You are probably confusing Free Software[0] with open source software[1]. If you still hold your point we are arguing semantics and stating that your interpretation (a minority interpretation) is right and that most of the software industry and open source c…
OSI #5-10 are kind of a spelled out form of Freedom 0
OSI #2 maps pretty much directly onto Freedom 1 (The title of OSI #2 just says source code, but the body text specifies more)
OSI #1 is Freedom 2
OSI #3 maps to Freedom 3, with #4 being a clarification of what is allowed.
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It entirely depends on the CLA. But the CLAs I've seen referenced generally only do one thing: give the entity who issued the CLA the rights to do pretty much whatever they want with your code (one key right is often the ability to go closed source or otherwise re-license the work without the author's permission) while usually granting the author no additional rights or consideration. It is often as close as you can…
> the CLAs I've seen referenced generally only do one thing: give the entity who issued the CLA the rights to do pretty much whatever they want with your code (one key right is often the ability to go closed source or otherwise re-license the work without the author's permission) while usually granting the author no additional rights or consideration. Indeed, but submitting a contribution under an MIT-style permissiv…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I did not say that, nor do I believe it, nor is it really related. What is the practical difference between contributing under a CLA to a project that's currently under an open-source license and contributing under a non-copyleft open-source license while retaining the copyright yourself? In both cases the project's ability to "go closed source" seems substantially the same, so it seems to me that your arguments ag…
It entirely depends on the CLA. But the CLAs I've seen referenced generally only do one thing: give the entity who issued the CLA the rights to do pretty much whatever they want with your code (one key right is often the ability to go closed source or otherwise re-license the work without the author's permission) while usually granting the author no additional rights or consideration. It is often as close as you can…
That's not true. With most CLAs, you retain all rights to your submission. You just give the maintainer a very generous license. I haven't seen a CLA that requires you to give up any rights to your own contribution.
If the maintainer decides to switch to a closed source license, you are free to fork and maintain an open source version with your changes.
This is the difference to copyright assignment. If you produce something as contractor or employee, usually whoever pays for your work owns it, and you can't go and publish your work under an open source license.
Yes, CLA that transfer all ownership to the project are bad. But many CLA are in place to protect the project from bad actors. For example companies suing the project because an employee has submitted code that he wasn't allowed to make public.
I use a CLA in an open source project. But it does not transfer ownership. It just states that the contributor is allowed to make the contributions and accepts the license.
https://gist.github.com/Pro/7d90e84b0765e7aa9068667e3418ef52
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> the CLAs I've seen referenced generally only do one thing: give the entity who issued the CLA the rights to do pretty much whatever they want with your code (one key right is often the ability to go closed source or otherwise re-license the work without the author's permission) while usually granting the author no additional rights or consideration. Indeed, but submitting a contribution under an MIT-style permissiv…
The difference is that the author was aware of that grant at the time they contributed the code since it was implicit in the license. CLAs are often essentially a way to backdoor additional grants after the fact without the original author's permission.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that copyright transfer is not even legally applicable in many jurisdictions.
As far as I understand, not as such, but you can transfer all rights to another. That's how copyright from employee to employer works in Germany AFAIK. So practically it ends up being the same in nearly all cases.
As a counterpoint, read https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html where the GNU project explains why they require copyright assignments. And their stated issues are not trivial. I have personally run into a few cases where people thought that they owned their work, but actually it was owned by their employer. I don't have to look very far - it happened to me personally when I lived in New York. (Not entirely co…