Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?

Re:Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do? by mch82 on Saturday December 14, 2019 @08:36AM (#21789436)

> Basically a combo of GPL and taking community contributions without having them assign copyright to you is the most full proof way to keep something open source.

Sorry, but your advice is refuted by research. Both GNU and Apache ask developers to sign contributor licensing agreements. For Apache, see “ASF Contributor Agreements”, https://www.apache.org/licenses/contributor-agreements.html. For GNU, see “Copyright & Compliance” at https://www.fsf.org/licensing/.

The Wikipedia article about Contributor License Agreements cites this article by OSS Watch, http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/cla. This is the first time I’ve heard of OSS Watch, but they might be a helpful source of legal advice based on their About page, http://oss-watch.ac.uk/about/

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Re:Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do? by ghaff on Saturday December 14, 2019 @11:19AM (#21790236)

Opinions differ on CLAs. There are certainly arguments for them as laid out in that article.

There are also arguments against them in many cases, including that they create friction for new contributors. "Oh, I have to sign this agreement which means talking to my company's legal staff? I think I'll just pass."

The parent is also probably right that GPL with no CLA makes it much harder to change a project's license. This actually came up when GPL v3 was released. As it turned out, Linux apparently didn't want to change Linux from a v2 to a v3 license. But there were also legal questions about whether he could do so by himself even had he wanted to. (Though Eben Moglen argued at the time that he maybe possibly could have for various arcane reasons.)

ADDED: I recorded a podcast on this and related issues recently: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/open-governance-chris-...

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Re:Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do? by mch82 on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @01:36AM (#21822406)

Your podcast is very good! I recommended the series to a friend who manages an open source project. Looking forward to your other interviews.

In the podcast episode, the guest does mention people are moving away from CLAs. He goes on to say projects are adopting a “Developer Certificate of Origin” model. I found an article that helped me start to understand differences in these models: “CLA vs. DCO: What's the difference?”, https://opensource.com/article/18/3/cla-vs-dco-whats-differe....

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Re:Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do? by mch82 on Sunday December 15, 2019 @08:23AM (#21796097)

Thank you for the citation. I’ve added that episode (and the rest) to my listening queue & look forward to your other episodes too. Looks like a cool podcast!

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Re:Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do? by monocasa on Saturday December 14, 2019 @11:17AM (#21790221)

A CLA isn't necessarily a copyright grant. The Apache one for instance doesn't have you assigning copyright to the Apache foundation. It's just signing that you actually own the works in question.

I have issues with the GNU assignment. It means that we're reliant on future owners of the GNU project to not ever relicense the codebase. A single owner is a single point of failure.

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Re:Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do? by ghaff on Saturday December 14, 2019 @11:20AM (#21790248)

I've heard that sort of thing called a developer certificate of origin or something along those lines.

The FSF is arguably something a bit unique. But most of the point of a CLA is to give a company/organization ultimate control over a code base so that it can dual license, etc.

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