On 15/02/14 18:06, Florian Weimer wrote:
- Johannes Zarl:
Let me make my thoughts more explicit (keeping the Qt example from my mail from Friday):
Person A wants to contribute to the Qt project, and signs the CLA that allows Digia to have a dual-licensing with both GPL and their proprietary license. Therefore the CLA makes it possible to distribute the code under non-free licenses. Therefore person A can not value software freedom.
Or the person is not aware what the CLA implies, or disagrees about the impact of those implications.
This is a complicated topic. I don't understand why the FSFE is against CLAs, considering that it granted permissions to use FLA code in proprietary programs (see the previous discussion about the agreement with Bacula Systems—the published agreement is not even restricted to Bacula code).
The worst CLAs are basically like employment agreements - but without a salary
There is a big difference between assigning copyright (or giving an unlimited license to sub-license) to a company and giving those rights to a democratically managed non-profit organisation like FSF(E).
There are always going to be a subset of developers who will never sign a CLA to a third-party corporation. As a consequence, those projects with corporate CLAs are always going to be at a disadvantage.