Contributor license agreement - Wikipedia

Contributor license agreement - Wikipedia
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Contributor License Agreement
CLA
) defines the terms under which
intellectual property
has been contributed to a company/project, typically software under an
open source license
Rationale
edit
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 a
copyleft
license, since without a CLA the contribution would restrict the guardian as well.
The purpose of a CLA is to ensure that the guardian of a project's outputs has the necessary ownership or grants of rights over all contributions to allow them to distribute under the chosen license, often by granting an irrevocable license to allow the project maintainer to use the contribution; if copyright is actually transferred, the agreement is more normally known as a
Copyright Transfer Agreement
. CLAs also have roles in raising awareness of
IPR
issues within a project.
Relicensing controversy
edit
See also:
Server Side Public License
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
edit
In 2019
MongoDB
used these rights granted by its CLA to achieve a move to a non-open-source license.
In January 2021, the
Elasticsearch
project used such rights to move the project to a non-open-source license
arguing
Amazon
had been "misleading and confusing the community".
[...] 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 [...]
CLAs which restrict relicensing
edit
Project Harmony
edit
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.
10
Fedora
edit
The
Fedora Project
formerly required contributors to sign a CLA, either as an organization or as an individual.
11
However, this was retired in 2011
12
and instead contributors must agree to the
Fedora Project Contributor Agreement
, which is not a license agreement and does not include assignment of copyright.
Users
edit
Companies and projects that use CLAs include:
.NET Foundation
13
Apache Software Foundation
14
Canonical Ltd
15
Clojure
16
Cloud Native Computing Foundation
17
CyanogenMod
18
Diaspora
19
Digia/
Qt Project
20
Discourse
21
Django
22
Dojo Toolkit
23
eBay Software Foundation
, LLC
24
25
Subsidiary of eBay
Eclipse
26
Elastic
27
Element
28
29
Go
30
Google
31
HashiCorp
32
Home Assistant
33
InfluxDB
34
Joomla
35
jQuery
36
Kubernetes
37
OpenBMC
38
Python
39
Meteor
40
Microsoft
41
MuseScore
42
OpenMediaVault
43
OpenStack
44
Puppet
45
Salesforce
46
Sangoma
47
TiddlyWiki
48
TLDR Pages
49
W3C
50
Zed (text editor)
51
Zend Technologies
for
Zend Framework
(1.x series only)
KDE
edit
KDE
uses
Free Software Foundation Europe
's
Fiduciary Licence Agreement
52
of which (FLA-1.2) states in section 3.3:
FSFE shall only exercise the granted rights and licences in accordance with the principles of Free Software as defined by the Free Software Foundations. FSFE guarantees to use the rights and licences transferred in strict accordance with the regulations imposed by Free Software licences, including, but not limited to, the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) or the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL) respectively. In the event FSFE violates the principles of Free Software, all granted rights and licences shall automatically return to the Beneficiary and the licences granted hereunder shall be terminated and expire.
53
However, it is optional and every contributor is allowed not to assign their copyright to KDE e.V.
See also
edit
Developer Certificate of Origin
Know your customer
Open-core model
References
edit
"Licenses"
www.apache.org
"Contributing FAQ"
mysql.com
. Archived from
the original
on 2007-12-09
. Retrieved
2007-12-22
"Contributor Licence Agreements"
. Oss-watch.ac.uk
. Retrieved
2014-01-24
comments, 28 Feb 2019 Richard FontanaFeed 291up 2.
"Why CLAs aren't good for open source"
Opensource.com
. Retrieved
2021-01-26
{{
cite web
}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (
link
Corbet, Jonathan (2018-10-18).
"Making the GPL more scary"
LWN.net
. Retrieved
2023-04-29
"Upcoming licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana"
www.elastic.co
. 2021-01-14. Archived from
the original
on 2021-01-14
. Retrieved
2023-04-29
"Amazon: NOT OK - why we had to change Elastic licensing"
www.elastic.co
. 2021-01-14. Archived from
the original
on 2023-03-30
. Retrieved
2023-04-29
DeVault, Drew (2021-01-19).
"Elasticsearch does not belong to Elastic"
drewdevault.com
. Retrieved
2023-04-29
"Guide to the CAs | Harmony Agreements"
harmonyagreements.org
. Retrieved
2021-01-26
"Contributor agreement form | Contributors"
Ubuntu
. Retrieved
2021-01-26
"Legal:Licenses/CLA - Fedora Project Wiki"
fedoraproject.org
. Retrieved
2023-01-29
"Meeting:Board meeting 2011-04-05 - Fedora Project Wiki"
fedoraproject.org
. Retrieved
2023-01-29
"Contribution License Agreement"
. .NET Foundation.org
. Retrieved
2015-01-11
"Licenses"
. Apache.org
. Retrieved
2014-01-24
"Canonical contributor license agreement"
Canonical Ubuntu
. Retrieved
2014-01-24
"Clojure - Contributor Agreement"
"CNCF Linux Foundation ID CLA signing FAQ"
. Retrieved
2020-10-19
"Individual Contributor License Grant"
. CyanogenMod. Archived from
the original
on 2016-03-08.
"diaspora/diaspora · GitHub"
. Github.com
. Retrieved
2014-01-24
"Legal Aspects"
. Qt Project
. Retrieved
2014-01-24
"CLA assistant"
"Contributor License Agreements | Django"
. Djangoproject.com
. Retrieved
2014-01-24
"CLA"
. The Dojo Foundation
. Retrieved
2014-01-24
"SeLion : Individual Contributor License Agreement (CLA)"
. Retrieved
2015-02-23
"LIST OF SUBSIDIARIES AS OF DECEMBER 31, 2014"
. Retrieved
2015-02-23
"Eclipse Foundation Contributor License Agreement"
. Eclipse.org. 2013-06-17
. Retrieved
2014-01-24
"Contributor Agreement Elastic"
. elastic.co.
Speed, Richard.
"Matrix-based Element plots move from Apache 2.0 to AGPLv3"
www.theregister.com
. Retrieved
2023-11-06
"Contributing to Facebook Projects"
. facebook.com
. Retrieved
2015-07-08
"CONTRIBUTORS - The Go Programming Language"
. Golang.org
. Retrieved
2014-01-24
"Google Individual Contributor License Agreement, v1.1"
. Google Inc
. Retrieved
2014-06-09
Hashicorp.
"Contributor License Agreement"
Hashicorp: Infrastructure Enables Innovation
. Retrieved
2021-08-09
Schoutsen, Paulus (2017-01-21).
"Home Assistant Governance [updated]"
Home Assistant
. Retrieved
2024-03-04
"InfluxDB Contributor License Agreement"
. Retrieved
25 August
2014
"Contribute"
. Developer.joomla.org
. Retrieved
2014-01-24
jQuery Foundation - jquery.org.
"jQuery Foundation Contributor License Agreement | Contribute to jQuery"
. Contribute.jquery.org
. Retrieved
2014-01-24
Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
"Kubernetes CLA"
. CNCF
. Retrieved
2019-02-19
GitHub - openbmc/docs
, openbmc, 2019-02-20
, retrieved
2019-02-21
"Contributing to the PSF"
. Python Software Foundation.
"Contributing to Meteor"
. Contribute.meteor.com
. Retrieved
2014-01-24
"Contributing to Microsoft Visual Studio Code"
. Microsoft
. Retrieved
2016-04-22
"Contributor License Agreement | MuseScore"
musescore.org
. Retrieved
2019-08-30
"Contributor Agreement"
. OpenMediaVault
. Retrieved
2014-01-24
"OpenStack Contributors License Agreement"
. OpenStack
. Retrieved
2014-01-24
"Puppet Contributor License Agreement"
. Retrieved
2016-02-01
"Salesforce Contributor License Agreement"
. Archived from
the original
on 2020-07-28
. Retrieved
2020-05-21
"CONTRIBUTOR LICENSE AGREEMENT"
www.sangoma.com
. 2023-04-26. Archived from
the original
on 2023-04-29
. Retrieved
2023-04-29
"License"
TiddlyWiki
. 19 December 2022.
"TLDR-pages/TLDR"
GitHub
. 26 February 2022.
"W3C Community Contributor License Agreement (CLA)"
. Community and Business Groups.
W3C
. Retrieved
2024-05-11
"Zed Contributor License and Feedback Agreement - Zed — Love your editor again"
zed.dev
. Retrieved
2025-12-23
"FSFE welcomes KDE's adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA)"
. 2008-08-22.
"Fiduciary Licence Agreement (Version 1.2)"
(PDF)
. Retrieved
2010-12-31
External links
edit
Contributor Licence Agreements
from
OSS Watch
ContributorAgreements.org
CLA assistant
— enables contributors to sign CLAs from within a pull request
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