OSI-approved license that assigns contributor copyright to me

[Brian Behlendorf]

On Tue, 12 Jul 2005, Alex Bligh wrote:
> AFAIK the Apache license (without the additional paperwork assignment)
> only grants the Apache foundation the same rights as anyone else, i.e.
> to use the code under the terms of the license.

Read section 5 carefully.  It makes implicit what our separate Contributor 
Agreement makes explicit - that when you give us a Contribution, you're 
also giving us the right to incorporate that work into an Apache-licensed 
work and redistribute it.  That language alleviates the need for us to 
obtain Contributor Agreements for every single bugfix or feature patch 
that comes into the foundation from the many Contributors who are not 
committers to our repositories.  It also gives more legal backbone to the
convention we all assume anyways - that when someone shows up on one of 
our dev lists and posts a patch, they're doing so with the intent of 
seeing it incorporated into our project.

The Contributor Agreement is still important for contributions that are 
clearly new works or major additions that can't clearly be called 
derivatives of existing Apache code, plus being explicit about the 
contribution relationship will look better to an IP auditor.

> The Apache license is not restrictive (at least not in the same ways as 
> David was proposing), so what it does not do (as far as I can tell) is 
> allow the Apache Foundation to license modifications under different 
> terms (for instance a proprietary license). I'm doing this from memory 
> and from your quote above without going back and checking, so do correct 
> me if I'm wrong.

The ASF, as well as anyone else, can sublicense the work - meaning they 
*can* relicense it, so long as the new license follows all the 
requirements of the Apache license.  That includes terms that would not be 
allowed in an Open Source license.  Now it's unlikely that the ASF would 
release any works under a non-Open-Source license given its public benefit 
501c3 charter, but others certainly can.

 	Brian