[License-discuss] FAQ entry on CLAs

[Lawrence Rosen]

John Cowan wrote:
> Open source licenses grant things to whomever has the source code;....

Do you mean "grant things to whomever accepts the terms and conditions of
the license"?

/Larry


-----Original Message-----
From: John Cowan [mailto:cowan at mercury.ccil.org] 
Sent: Saturday, January 17, 2015 12:00 PM
To: license-discuss at opensource.org
Subject: Re: [License-discuss] FAQ entry on CLAs

Engel Nyst scripsit:

> There is probably no way to make a statement like this without taking 
> a position, and the above does that. It's saying that "inbound agreements"
> are something else than open licenses, fulfill an unspecified need 
> that open licenses don't. That open licenses are meant to be 
> "outbound" (to whom?). That alone contributes to confusion about open
source licensing.

While I agree with what you are saying (there is no reason why any open
source license can't be used as a contributor agreement, and some projects
actually work that way), there is a fundamental difference between the FSF's
CLA and the GPL, namely that the CLA is not a *public* license.
Open source licenses grant things to whomever has the source code; a CLA
normally grants things (anything up to full copyright ownership) only to the
party they are addressed to.

We could say that implicit requirement 0 of the OSD is that the object of
discussion is a public software license.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
You're a brave man! Go and break through the lines, and remember while
you're out there risking life and limb through shot and shell,
we'll be in here thinking what a sucker you are!    --Rufus T. Firefly
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