Contributors mailing list archives
contributors@odoo-community.org
Browse archives
Re: Time to change our CLA
by
Opener B.V., Stefan Rijnhart
On 16-01-16 08:52, Yajo wrote: > > > To the maximum extent permitted by the relevant law, You grant to Us > a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, > irrevocable license under the Copyright covering the Contribution, > with the right to sublicense such rights through multiple tiers of > sublicensees, to reproduce, modify, display, perform and distribute > the Contribution as part of the Material; provided that this license > is conditioned upon compliance with Section 2.3. > > That means that you can wake up one day and realise that module you > contributed last week under AGPL is today LGPL, BSD or Apache. Not fun > either. > > IMHO it's time to drop that. Instead, the CLA should state that no > contributions under non-OSI licenses will be taken, and that you get > for granted that your contribution will never be sublicensed without > your consent. > Hi Yajo, I don't agree. The governance of the body of code in the OCA is one of the main objectives of the OCA organization and this clause is essential to guarantee the continuity of this body of work. I'm thinking of cases in which Odoo relicenses to an AGPL incompatible but OSI approved license, or in the case of an update to the AGPL (a future AGPL-4) from which all contributors would benefit. Remember that the Linux kernel could not switch to GPL-3 because it would be unfeasible to track all individual contributors to ask their permission (for instance, because they are no longer amongst us). Note that section 2.3 of https://github.com/OCA/odoo-community.org/raw/master/cla/Odoo Community Association-Individual.pdf mentions that contributions can only ever be relicensed under an OSI approved license. In combination with the layered structure of membership organization which protects the OCA against a hostile takeover, that is good enough for me. Best regards, Stefan.
