OSI-approved license that assigns contributor copyright to me

[Brian Behlendorf]

On Tue, 12 Jul 2005, Alex Bligh wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I think we are in heated agreement with eachother here. It allows
> you to incorporate that contribution in an *APACHE-LICENSED-WORK*. It does
> not allow you (for instance) into a proprietary licensed work. This
> isn't an issue for the Apache Federation (clearly) but is for David.

I thought David was looking for a way to be able to incorporate 
contributions into his works legally without having to execute a lot of 
paperwork, so I thought section 5 was appropriate to mention, as it is not 
a common clause in Open Source licenses, and is definitely different than 
what you say in your first paragraph above.

Further, I am not sure whether your negation immediately above is 
accurately stated - in the case of the Apache license, the Contribution 
can go into an Apache licensed work. Then, that new work can be 
sublicensed under any license that follows the requirements of Apache's 
license - and that new license may very well be a proprietary license. 
If David's goal is to *prevent* those contributions to his work from 
ending up in proprietary code, as a reassurance to his contributors 
perhaps, then all he needs to do is make his license a copyleft license. 
But if he is alright with allowing it, then the Apache license as it 
stands would be sufficient for his needs.

 	Brian