Contribution agreements (Re: [sldev] What is the point of firstlook and giving feedback to LL)

[Rob Lanphier]

Contribution agreements are common but not universal.  Sun has a pretty 
comprehensive FAQ for theirs here:
http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/contributor_agreement.jsp

A very common objection to contribution agreements generally and 
specifically with Linden Lab's is that it allows us to relicense the 
contribution such that it can be incorporated into proprietary 
products.  Our position is that such a clause allows us to build a 
business model that allows us to pay the paychecks of more developers to 
write GPL licensed source code. This seems like a net win to me.

Rob

On 4/21/08 5:41 PM, Brad Kittenbrink (Brad Linden) wrote:
> I'd like to chime in and add that this is not specific to commercial 
> projects either.  The FSF has a very similar policy for GNU projects: 
> http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AssignCopyright and 
> that's a big part of the historical reason for the permanence of the  
> fork of xemacs from emacs 
> (http://www.xemacs.org/About/XEmacsVsGNUemacs.html).  Many other open 
> source projects operate similarly.  Projects like xemacs and the 
> kernel that don't do this legal legwork are unusual I suspect, but I 
> have no numbers to back that up.
>
> -Brad
>
> Soft wrote:
>> More to it, the contributor agreement is an attempt at getting a
>> single statement blessed by our legal department that the patches
>> really are offered under specific terms of use. A mixture of
>> differently worded offers to random Lindens through random channels
>> would paralyze us. We'd constantly be stuck, trying to figure out what
>> we can and can't do with code incorporating code under all those
>> different offers.
>>
>> Even if we were a pure GPL project of this scale, as a commercial
>> project we'd be mad to work without a contributor agreement. Take a
>> look at the SCO debacle to see what ad hoc licensing work can lead to.
>> An event like that would be trouble not just for LL, but for anyone
>> else redistributing the code.
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 2:51 PM, Harold Brown <labrat.hb at gmail.com> 
>> wrote:
>>  
>>> The release client is not GPL.  Without the contribution agreement
>>>  they can't add that code to the release client.   Which means it then
>>>  can't be added to the GPL code, because that code is derived from the
>>>  closed license release client.
>>>     
>
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