[beyond-licensing] Legal topics that FOSS projects could use more information on

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 01:59:30PM -0400, Deb Nicholson wrote:
> Perhaps, we could disentangle the two potential upsides of copyright
> assignment; 1) avoiding a bureaucratic nightmare later on and 2)
> making sure a FOSS codebase stays FOSS, and make recommendations for
> projects with one or both of those goals?

I realize that you might have already discussed this on a subsequent
call (BTW, do we have a place where call minutes, or maybe even just
links to the relevant titanpads, are archived? I find hard to chase the
links via the mailing list only...).

But FWIW I think Deb's idea here is really good. It's similar in spirit,
but way better, than the "pros/cons" distinction for CLA/CAA that I
initially proposed.  People who do want them for reasons other than
proprietary relicensing see the need of avoiding bureaucratic nightmares
down the road; people who want to absolutely avoid proprietary
relicensing are ready to take the risk of such a bureaucratic nightmare
in exchange of certainty against taking their stuff proprietary. And of
course there are a bunch of middle grounds (e.g., CLA/CAA with
guarantees on the choice of license, etc).

What matters here is that the proposed framing might help distilling the
various arguments, and at the same time clarifying that the most
relevant "attack vector" to FOSS that is implementable with CLA/CAA is
proprietary relicensing. That would be rather factual information, and
would allow readers to weigh their choices accordingly.

Cheers.
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli  . . . . . . .  zack at upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader . . . . . @zacchiro . . . . o o o . . . o .
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