Contributor License Agreement

A Contributor License Agreement (CLA) defines the terms under which intellectual property has been contributed to a company/project, typically software under an open source license.

Rationale

CLAs can be used to enable vendors to easily pursue legal resolution in the case of copyright disputes,^[1] or to relicense products from which contributions have been received from third parties.^[2]

Users

Companies/projects that use CLAs include:

• Apache Software Foundation
• Canonical Ltd, the company behind Ubuntu ^[3]
• Zend for Zend Framework (1.x series only)
• Django ^[4]
• Node.js ^[5]
• Diaspora^[6]
• Joomla^[7]

Canonical

The Canonical contributor agreement was a Contributor License Agreement required by Canonical Ltd for all contributions to many projects established by Canonical.

In it, the contributor assigned copyright to Canonical and at the same time Canonical gave the contributor "a world-wide, non-exclusive, royalty-free and perpetual right to use, copy, modify, communicate and make available to the public (including without limitation via the Internet) and distribute, in each case in an original or modified form, the Assigned Contributions as (they) wish."^[8][9]

Canonical started Project Harmony "...to assist organisations which use contribution agreements by providing standardised variable templates with clear and concise explanations..."^[10]

As of August 2011, Canonical is requesting contributions be licenced under a Harmony Contribution Licence Agreement, rather than the copyright being assigned to Canonical.^[11]

Projects requiring contributors to sign this agreement include:^[8]

• Unity
• XSplash
• Launchpad
• Uncomplicated Firewall (ufw)
• Update Manager
• Ubiquity
• Ubuntu One
• Upstart

KDE

KDE uses Free Software Foundation Europe's Fiduciary Licence Agreement^[12] which states in section 3.3:

FSFE shall only exercise the granted rights and licences in accordance with the principles of Free Software as defined by the Free Software Foundations. FSFE guarantees to use the rights and licences transferred in strict accordance with the regulations imposed by Free Software licences, including, but not limited to, the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) or the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL) respectively. In the event FSFE violates the principles of Free Software, all granted rights and licences shall automatically return to the Beneficiary and the licences granted hereunder shall be terminated and expire.^[13]

However, it is optional and every contributor is allowed not to assign his copyright to KDE e.V.

See also

• Project Harmony (FOSS group)

References

1. ^ http://www.apache.org/licenses/ licensing page
2. ^ http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/ContributingFAQ Contributing FAQ
3. ^ http://www.canonical.com/contributors
4. ^ http://www.djangoproject.com/foundation/cla/
5. ^ http://nodejs.org/cla.html
6. ^ http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora
7. ^ http://developer.joomla.org/contributor-agreements.html
8. ^ ^{a b} "Canonical's contributor agreement". http://www.canonical.com/contributors. Retrieved 2010-12-31. 
9. ^ Canonical Ltd (December 2010). "Contributor Agreement V2.5". http://www.canonical.com/system/files/Canonical%20Contributor%20Agreement%2C%20ver%202.5.pdf. Retrieved 31 December 2010. 
10. ^ Amanda Brock (2010-06-24). "Project Harmony looks to improve contribution agreements". http://opensource.com/law/10/6/project-harmony-looks-improve-contribution-agreements-0. 
11. ^ "Canonical's contributor agreement". 2011-08-10. http://www.canonical.com/contributors. 
12. ^ "FSFE welcomes KDE's adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA)". 2008-08-22. http://ev.kde.org/announcements/2008-08-22-fsfe-welcomes-fla.php. 
13. ^ "Fiduciary Licence Agreement (Version 1.2)". http://www.fsfe.org/projects/ftf/FLA.en.pdf. Retrieved 2010-12-31. 

External links

• Contributor Licence Agreements from OSS Watch