[License-review] For Approval: Convertible Free Software License, Version 1.1 (C-FSL v1.1)

[Elmar Stellnberger]

A contributor license agreement will work for large industry scale 
applications with many programmers. It will not work for a private 
project of mine because people would either ignore any contributor 
license agreement in my name or even rather wildly develop different 
forks without a mainline/upstream project.

On 10/2/18 5:33 PM, Bruce Perens wrote:
> That's why you use a contributor license agreement. If you only accept 
> contributions from people who have signed the agreement, you know you 
> have the right to relicense or reassign the copyright. And since the 
> contributor has signed the agreement, not simply accepted a tear-open 
> license, you have real evidence of their consent which protects you from 
> lawsuits.
> 
> Many Open Source projects use a CLA, even when they don't plan to make 
> any commercial product at all. It provides some additional confidence to 
> the project that the contribution was made with the authority of the 
> copyright holder (who is often the author's employer rather than the 
> author), etc.
> 
>      Thanks
> 
>      Bruce
> 
> On Tue, Oct 2, 2018 at 3:17 AM Elmar Stellnberger <estellnb at elstel.org 
> <mailto:estellnb at elstel.org>> wrote:
> 
>     The problem about dual licensing is that I can not be sure whether I
>     may
>     use contributions made to the open source branch of the project. I
>     would
>     have to reprogram every patch sent to the open source branch in
>     order to
>     assimilate it in the proprietary branch. - and then there are
>     patches so
>     tiny that you can not reprogram them. That is a problem although tiny
>     patches where there is no other way to achieve the same functionality
>     should not fall under copyright law.
> 
>     On 10/1/18 11:30 PM, Bruce Perens wrote:
>      > Dual-licensing is a well-developed strategy for mixing pure Open
>     Source
>      > licensing with paid licensing producing income, with both sides
>      > producing benefit for the other. It sounds like some of the people
>      > commenting haven't learned about it. It is legally much better
>      > structured than the submitted license, in part because of the use
>     of a
>      > contributor license agreement. There is also the potential for a
>      > covenant back to the developer preventing the product from being
>     taken
>      > entirely private.
>      >
>      >      Thanks
>      >
>      >      Bruce
>      >
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>      >
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Bruce Perens K6BP - CEO, Legal Engineering
> Standards committee chair, license review committee member, co-founder, 
> Open Source Initiative
> President, Open Research Institute; Board Member, Fashion Freedom 
> Initiative.