OSI-approved license that assigns contributor copyright to me
David Barrett
dbarrett at quinthar.com
Sun Jul 10 09:07:11 UTC 2005
I've developed an application from scratch, and thus I own the copyright
on the entire codebase. I'd like to dual-license the codebase, once
under an OSI-approved open-souce license, and a second time under a
commercial license. Naturally the question is how to incorporate code
contributed under the OSI license into my commercial release.
For maximum flexibility, I would like to have the OSI license require
contributors to transfer ownership of the copyright of their contributed
code to me, thus enabling me to re-license it just as my own. In this
way, I retain total ownership over the copyright of the entire codebase,
whether written by me or not.
Is there an OSI license that does this, or nearly this?
Reading through the list, it appears the QPL (Qt Public License) is the
nearest. However, (so far as I can tell -- it's rather complex) it
doesn't explicitly transfer ownership over the copyright back to the
"initial developer". Indeed, the key paragraph is:
----
b. When modifications to the Software are released under this license, a
non-exclusive royalty-free right is granted to the initial developer of
the Software to distribute your modification in future versions of the
Software provided such versions remain available under these terms in
addition to any other license(s) of the initial developer.
----
Overall I find the entire license a bit confusing (who is the 'initial
developer'? Linus? Charles Babbage?) and more complicated than I would
think is necesasry. Rather, I think the essential clauses would include
something like:
1) You can modify the software so long as you give up all rights to the
modification and immediately assign ownership of the modification's
copyright to David Barrett
2) You can redistribute the compiled software so long as you make
available for download the uncompiled source code
3) You can redistribute the modified or unmodified software in
uncompiled souce code form so long as it is complete, non-obfuscated,
blah blah legalese
Is there an OSI license that accomplishes this in a more straightforward
and deliberate fashion than the QPL? Thanks!
-david
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