[License-discuss] Contributor Clauses in Licenses

[Josh Berkus]

On 12/8/25 1:46 PM, David Woolley wrote:
>> 1. Unless enforced by some other mechanism (CLA, repository TOS, 
>> etc.), it is not automatically true that contributions are under the 
>> license in the first place;
> 
> CLAs aren't licences to the contributor, but rather a licence from the 
> contributor to the initial developer, often allowing the initial 
> developer to use the contributions outside of open source licensing.  As 
> such I don't see how they can be used to constrain someone creating 
> modifications to the code.

Other way around.  The outgoing license is trying to put conditions on 
how you contribute to the upstream project.

-- 
Josh Berkus