Contributor's license agreement (CLA)

In the case of new development, should governments enforce CLA? Should we provide a template?

Based on the principle that a government should not own the copyright in the long run, should the government make sure an organization for the f/oss project is created to be the owner of the CLA? Should the rule be that no government should be the owner of CLA?

  • What would be the rules for such an organization?
  • What should be checked ?
  • organization should have its own account / repository?
  • if a new organization is created it should have at least one actor external to the government or another government? Would the administration and the subcontractor working for that administration be enough?
  • What about governance / commit rights?
  • When should this be setup? As soon as an external contribution is accepted might be too early, but once the project is successful it might be too late.

Should CLA never be required by governments to make sure that the licenses choices are never changed afterwards?

Some governments cannot own copyrights, the US being the premier example. For those that can, what would be the point of requiring copyright assignment to the government? It would just upset contributors - many don’t like CLAs. The government needs to make sure that it uses a FLOSS license which it itself can live with the terms of. And then there’ s no need for a CLA.

If there is no CLA, the copyright in the contributions remains with the various contributors. And that’s fine.

I think most people would be against a CAA ; but a minimal CLA à la « Developer’s Certificate of Origin » of the Linux Kernel may be a good starting point.

On this subject, Bradley Kuhn’s article is interesting and has a good Further Reading section :

http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/07/07/harmony-harmful.html

For me, CLA and DCO have different purposes and are not the same documents.

If I totally agree that government should never propose CLA, I am more doubtful regarding organizations that would be responsible for the code, once the project is mature enough to be part of an organization.

The questions is for me the most probable risk occurrence:

  • What is the risk that code needs to be relicensed? I have the Wikimedia history in mind with the migration from GFDL to CC-BY-SA
  • What is the risk of the organization in charge of the project closing future development of the software?

Also from an impact perspective, isn’t the impossibility to adapt the license more harmful than the possibility to fork if future development were closed?

Last, isn’t setting up a CLA a best practice of good IP management? What is the history and reasons for Apache and eclipse CLA for example?

The Wikimedia thing was a one-off; people are better at choosing licenses today. And it doesn’t matter if the organization in charge stops development, as long as the code is under an open source license. That’s the whole point - your rights can’t be taken away. As long as the license is open source, why do you think forking would be prevented?

Mozilla doesn’t have a CLA, and we’ve not had problems. People own their own copyrights, everyone has the same rights given by the MPL. Simple, understandable, effective.

Fully agree. CLA:s are more disliked than liked. And if you have CLA:s, you have to manage them over time. Not very good use of taxpayer money.

If everything is just open under a normal license then the governments don’t need to have a lot of control over things. Better to let the open culture flourish!

Great discussion! A few comments:

  • As CLA are generally disliked, I would advise against them as well, unless it is really needed for a good reason
  • If we choose a permissive licence like MIT or BSD, relicensing is allowed anyway
  • Government of Canada (and I assume others as well) owns the copyright of what they produce by default
  • Therefore, Canadian public servants are not allowed to contribute to an OSS project where a CLA involving copyright assignment is required

Clearly one of the things that everybody hated about open office when it was at Sun / Oracle… CLAs :slight_smile: