[License-discuss] Contributor Clauses in Licenses

[Bruce Perens]

> Say I submit a 3-line PR to the included documentation for an OSS project.
No text contained within the license can enforce that my PR is under that
license.

I am not so sure. Strongly reciprocal licenses essentially say that any
derivative work must be under their terms, or it's infringing. These are
well accepted by OSI. Terms with the effect of creating legal clarity for
the combined work would in general be allowable. Obviously some arbitrary
terms would not be.

Bruce Perens K6BP

On Mon, Dec 8, 2025, 15:22 David Woolley <forums at david-woolley.me.uk> wrote:

> On 08/12/2025 21:57, Josh Berkus wrote:
>
> >
> > Other way around.  The outgoing license is trying to put conditions on
> > how you contribute to the upstream project.
>
> I think that's what I was saying, but to be concrete, my exposure to
> CLA's is for Asterisk, in which case the CLA allows Sangoma to use any
> contributions in their proprietary products.  Note that they are not
> including the need for the CLA, for official contributions, in their
> open source licensing, so the particular point of this thread doesn't
> apply.
>
> Taking up another point, that licence doesn't guarantee that
> contributions will be accepted.  Agreeing to the CLA is necessary, but
> not sufficient, for inclusion in the official repositories.
>
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