Comment by parhamn
4 years ago
> and we don’t ask for a contributor license agreement (CLA)
Makes me wonder what these are for (copyright transfer) and why they decided it’s not needed. It also makes me wonder if this sort of thing has ever been taken/tested in court or if it’s paranoid friction with little value add.
> Makes me wonder what these are for (copyright transfer) and why they decided it’s not needed. It also makes me wonder if this sort of thing has ever been taken/tested in court or if it’s paranoid friction with little value add.
Some companies/projects might use them purely to avoid possible future legal headaches (I think GNU does this), and I'm not sure to what degree that has actually been tested, but they can also allow re-licensing under a different license which is more clear cut and I think that's more the issue here
Amazon is trying to say that they'll never relicense the code, so they have no need to take ownership over contributions.
Indeed that is likely but I wonder why didn't they at least require a Developer's Cerificate of Origin [0] that kernel.org uses. This is really lightweight (just append one line to git commit message) and supposedly provides a minimum legal base for the change. IANAL.
[0]: https://blog.chef.io/introducing-developer-certificate-of-or...
I just opened a pull request to fix a few typos in the README. They are requiring a Developer's Certificate of Origin.
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Eric S. Raymond is against them, but also argues that they are harmful--as opposed to just useless--because if they ever got to court, a jurist would look at the practices of the community to decide whether such a thing is common enough that they should be required. [1]
I know GNU does it (at least for Emacs) under the reason that the FSF can go after any GPL violation only if it is the clear copyright holder, but no such case exists, to my knowledge.
[1] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8287
A copyright transfer would easily smell to people "Amazon is going to change the license at some point in the future to duck us over Elasticsearch-style". They're trying to avoid that smell.