Comment by gbraad
7 years ago
The reason this permission exists is that contributions will not be owned by your employer, but will be part of the project. It depends on your employer if they allow you to work on personal software that they do not claim ownership for or not. I think you are right to not use a pseudonym. I once did, and regret having done so.
It depends on the type of CLA. There are many CLAs that do not imply copyright assignment, it's just legalese to make sure that you are taking liability for making sure that you have the right to add your contributions to the project -- basically a longer-form version of the Linux DCO.
In those cases, your employer would own your contributions and thus you need permission from them to license their copyrighted work (your changes) under whatever the project license is.
But in any case, contributing under a pseudonym is something that you should think about very seriously. This has been done before in the Linux kernel and luckily nobody got sued over it, but it is basically copyright infringement mixed with various levels of fraud and deception. Don't do this to us poor maintainers.
> In those cases, your employer would own your contributions and thus you need permission from them to license their copyrighted work (your changes) under whatever the project license is.
How does your employer own what you do in your free time? AFAIK there is no job contract like that which is legally enforceable. At least in California.
It depends on the country. In some countries, work related to your job but done outside work (or work using company resources like a company laptop -- I believe in California this is also the case) might possibly be owned by your employer (if your work contract says so). For instance if you work on databases and in your free time you developed a really awesome database from scratch, that might be owned by your employer because of the training and learning resources your employer provided (I think this is the reasoning -- but personally I find it quite abhorrent).
But I assumed that GP was talking about wanting to contribute something they did on work time, not on their own time.
It's jurisdiction by jurisdiction. And even if it's not enforceable, it might still be very expensive to duke that issue out in the courts.
Worrying about these details is the last thing a project maintainer needs to be worrying about. Easier to just require everyone to have a belt, even the ones who say they own suspenders.
> I think you are right to not use a pseudonym. I once did, and regret having done so.
Did it cause you some problems later, or?
Well, the permission exists to ensure that the contributions will be owned by the project and not anyone's employer.
If that permission isn't secured, though, and the employee has a contract with their employer that signs ownership of some or all of their off-hours work over to their employer, and the employer decides to try and exercise those rights, then it's anyone's guess who the real owner would be. Might vary by jurisdiction. Might be down to whether the open source project can afford to lawyer up in the first place.
Given all that, a FOSS project isn't unwise for asking for a permission slip. You could argue that it's being over-cautious, but that's the project maintainer's decision, and it deserves to be respected.
Contributions can be owned by employers and things still work. That's how Linux development works for instance, and the DCO is arguably a similar "permission slip" (though it mainly depends on the honour system with contributors just asserting they have the right to contribute). Some CLAs are very similar to the DCO (for instance, the Apache CLAs or the Google/Kubernetes ones).
Out of curiosity, why do you regret it?