On Monday 20 August 2012 17:52:38 Frank Karlitschek wrote: > If someone has question please ask me :-) > > The agreement is here: > http://owncloud.org/documents/contributor-agreement.pdf The FAQ is here: > http://owncloud.org/documents/contributor-agreement-faq.pdf
Thanks for publishing this. I think getting clarity about the terms of contribution is an essential factor for any open source project. I have a couple of questions: * The agreement defines a contribution as anything which is contributed to projects maintained or managed by ownCloud Inc. This seems to be very broad and not limited to the core repository. How is this limitation to the core put into effect? * The definition of contribution is not limited to source code, but also includes anything else, which is contributed via any communication channel. Does that mean that for example an email sent to the mailing list is also considered a contribution and covered by the agreement? * The agreement says that the entire right on the contributions including all rights under copyright is transferred to ownCloud Inc. Transfer means the contributor gives up the right and gives it to ownCloud Inc., right? Does that mean the contributor doesn't have the right anymore to for example license the contributed code to another company under a different license? * The FAQ mentions the KDE Free Qt agreement as similar. One essential difference is that the KDE Free Qt agreement forces Qt to be released under a BSD license, if it's not maintained anymore by its owner. The benefit of this is that another company could build up the same business model based on dual- licensing as a successor, even if the original owner doesn't want or care anymore. This wouldn't be possible with ownCloud, right? In the (hopefully unlikely) case that onwCloud Inc. goes crazy or vanishes, the community will have the ownCloud code released under AGPL, but no other right (e.g. the right of the BSD license to incorporate the code in proprietary products without releasing the source code). * The FAQ also mentions HPCC Systems' Open Source Covenant as similar. Here also is an essential difference from the ownCloud agreement in that it guarantees that the open source project is maintained for at least three years after the contribution or it is donated to the community under a permissive open source license like MIT. This makes sure (like the KDE Free Qt agreement) that there is continued maintenance of the open source project as part of the proprietary activities based on the project. How is this made sure with ownCloud? The community pledge only mentions releasing the contribution under AGPL, but nothing about maintaining it as open source code for the future. By the way, there is a typo in the first sentence of the agreement. It says Ownloud there, not Owncloud. -- Cornelius Schumacher <[email protected]> _______________________________________________ Owncloud mailing list [email protected] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/owncloud
