[License-discuss] FAQ entry on CLAs

[David Woolley]

On 20/01/15 19:48, Engel Nyst wrote:
> Please do, though. It's worse to practically state that using an OSI
> approved license(s) doesn't seem to give the permissions necessary,
> within the bounds of the license, for anyone to combine one's project
> from different sources and distribute it.

One of the uses of CLA's is to allow the software to be re-licensed 
under a different open source licence.  This can prove highly desirable, 
but almost impossible, if there are large numbers of contributions under 
the old licence.  It might be needed because it has become important to 
integrate the work with work under and otherwise incompatible open 
source licence.  In the past, I think it has been necessary to remove 
contributions from a minor contributor, to achieve this, because they 
were unable or unwilling to licence it under the new licence. 
(Something similar happened with OpenStreetmap's map database; some 
geographical features had to be removed because the project was unable 
to get permission to use it under a new, less restrictive, licence.)

Another common reason is that the open source project is being sponsored 
by a commercial organisation, which wants rights use the software in a 
proprietary way as well.  They will not redistribute contributions which 
are not compatible with this.  That is the case with Asterisk.

In both cases, a third party can integrate their work without using a 
CLA, but they will have created a competing forked version, so their 
work is likely to much less well used than the official version.