OSI-approved license that assigns contributor copyright to me

[Alex Bligh]

Brian,

--On 12 July 2005 08:32 -0700 Brian Behlendorf <brian at collab.net> 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.

> 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.

Yes.

>> 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.

Exactly - the *new* license has to follow the requirements of the Apache
license.

Or am I missing something?

Alex