OSI-approved license that assigns contributor copyright to me

[Alex Bligh]

--On 11 July 2005 19:34 -0700 David Barrett <dbarrett at quinthar.com> wrote:

> Ok, so it seems that one option is to pick a plain-jane open-source
> license (such as GPL) and then execute an agreement (such as the Apache
> agreement that Andrew suggested) with each contributor in order to
> harvest the copyrights to all contributions and thus enable me to
> relicense the entire thing at a future date.
>
> However, are there no other options?  Is there no way to craft a single
> open-source license that accomplishes both objectives without separate
> paperwork?
>
> Granted, transferring the copyright requires paperwork (at least in the
> US), so that's out.  But it's not the copyright that I'm after, per se,
> it's the freedom to relicense the contributed code under new terms.  It
> would seem that I could do this even without the copyright, so long as
> the open-source license included the appropriate language.  I don't know
> what the language would be, but something along the lines of:

Yes - that's exactly the sort of approach we took with the OVPL :-)
The main difference between our approaches is really that the OVPL is
long, and your license is short. That's because we've based ours
on the MPL/CDDL, which is pretty specific in its terms, and drafted
by lawyers, rather than the "keep it short and simple" hand-drafted
agreement that you are trying to create. If you go into (say) the
difference between the MPL and early handcrafted licenses, you'll
note that all those extra words the lawyers have inserted are generally
there for a purpose. For instance, patent grants work rather differently
from copyright licenses. Equally, they contain a lot of "framework"
such as definitions, liability limitations, jurisdiction clauses and
so forth.

It's fair to say that there are really two schools of thought here,
depending on what you are trying to do:
a) let other people know the terms under which they can use your code
   (if you are not likely to want to go to court yourself)
b) generate an enforceable agreement which will demonstrate you have
   the right to use the code either if someone sues you (think SCO) or
   if you want to sue another.

Generally if (a) is what you are seeking to achieve, the shorter and
simpler the license, the better (and I will bet if you take your
hand-crafted license to an IP lawyer and say "fix this so it works" - i.e.
does (b) - it will get just as long as the OVPL). However, the larger
target^Worganization you are, the more fussy you become about license terms
(i.e. the more need there is for (b)), and (sadly) the less readable your
license becomes. That said, I have to say I think Netscape/Mozilla and
subsequently Sun did a great job in keeping their licenses comparatively
readable, which is one reason we based ours on the CDDL.

Alex