[License-discuss] Contributor Clauses in Licenses

[McCoy Smith]

If the contribution is a (C) derivative, I'm not sure I'm seeing why 
this is an issue. All OS licenses (other than the -0 ones) impose 
conditions on derivatives.

If the contribution is not a derivative, they're merely articulating the 
conditions under which a contribution would be accepted by the project 
maintainers, *not* a condition on how the non-derivative work can 
otherwise be used. Again, I don't see how that is an issue.

The bigger problem with these combined outbound license+inbound cla 
documents is they often attempt to impose non-reciprocal conditions -- 
i.e., outbound license has conditions -- attribution, source, etc., but 
inbound CLA imposes no conditions on the project maintainers w/r/t the 
submitted contributions. That makes the license discriminatory.

One could solve this problem by simply saying license in=license out but 
you don't need a separate clause in a license to do that.

On 12/8/2025 1:57 PM, Josh Berkus wrote:
> 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.
>
>
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