Thank you for the link. I read through it, along with the (much longer) blog post linked at the beginning. The first thing it made me realize is that I should be more clear: I am not advocating for a CLA! I agree with most of the arguments against them that both posts make.
All I was saying is that, given Racket does not have any form of copyright assignment agreement, as the blog post calls them, Racket as an organization does not possess the copyright to contributors’ code, and they do not control enforcement of that copyright. AFAICT, the linked blog post supports that (though it argues that’s a good thing, which I agree with, and it also makes an argument that a CLA doesn’t necessarily change that in a simple way, either, which was indeed news to me and was interesting to read). I feel like I have reason to believe my interpretation is correct, as it isn’t entirely theoretical. In 2014, the developers of the popular, open-source Minecraft server modding framework, CraftBukkit, decided to retire the project after years of volunteer work. Mojang, Minecraft’s developer, announced they had secretly purchased ownership of the project from its co-founders years before when they had hired several of them to become Mojang employees, and they said would continue the project themselves. That upset several of the volunteers, as they realized Mojang had been knowingly exploiting their unpaid labor for years without offering any help. One of the developers of CraftBukkit proceeded to send Mojang a DMCA takedown request for his own source code, as CraftBukkit was GPL-licensed, and the whole project was technically illegal to begin with (since it modified and redistributed proprietary Minecraft source code). Assuming the takedown request was legal (which is to say, assuming the developer really did hold the copyright), then to comply with it, Mojang would have needed to either release the Minecraft server code under the GPL, something they were clearly not about to do, or abandon CraftBukkit (or at least the parts of it that developer wrote). They chose the latter, despite surely having a perfectly capable legal team. Realistically, do I think any Racket contributors are going to start DMCAing projects in violation of the LGPL for parts of the Racket codebase they hold copyright on? No. But I don’t see why the situation would legally be any different for Racket than it was for CraftBukkit. > On Aug 23, 2019, at 14:48, Matthew Butterick <m...@mbtype.com> wrote: > > Bradley Kuhn, director of the SFC, has explained why FLOSS projects don't > need CLAs, along with some underlying legal truths about FLOSS contributions. > [1] > > [1] https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2014/jun/09/do-not-need-cla/ > <https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2014/jun/09/do-not-need-cla/> > > >> On 23 Aug 19, at 12:29 PM, Alexis King <lexi.lam...@gmail.com >> <mailto:lexi.lam...@gmail.com>> wrote: >> >> Maybe so, but that is, in fact, why I sent the email. I was hoping you could >> clue me in as to what I was missing. (Maybe it’s unfair of me to ask you for >> free legal analysis, but I don’t feel like it’s all that unreasonable to ask >> for just a little clarification here.) >> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/897EB36B-EBAC-4013-92D1-54B58419856A%40gmail.com.
