You know that cringey feeling you get when a politician who never read a line of code talks about cryptography?
Now you can imagine how a lawyer must feel when an engineer who never read an appellate opinion talks about law.
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In today’s instance of the above, #1 on HN is an article about CLAs which is dead wrong for any project with a permissive license (like MIT, BSD, and Apache), but which will certainly cause grief to Open Source maintainers for years.
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Can you elaborate on what you mean by "dead wrong"? Just that even without CLA the upstream can always do that if it's a permissive license?
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A project having a CLA doesn't imply copyright assignment anyway. For example, cla.developers.google.com/about/google-i is just an explicit license and patent grant.
Most of their open source projects use Apache 2 so it usually does little more than making the terms more formal and explicit.
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While I don't disagree, it doesn't seem to answer any part of my question..
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I'm trying to say that there are many reasons for using a CLA besides combining a copyleft license with copyright assignment. I don't think that's even a particularly common approach overall. Google, Microsoft, etc. avoid copyleft in the first place and aren't trying to do that.
For example, opensource.microsoft.com/pdf/microsoft- is the same thing as Google's agreement: an explicit permissive license grant (their projects all use permissive licenses anyway) and a scoped patent grant. It's a bit more fair with Google due to them using Apache 2 though.
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It makes very little sense to ask for copyright assignment if an extremely permissive license like MIT is used. In fact, asking for copyright assignment and then licensing it as Apache 2 would result in the project owner giving away patent licenses for code contributed by others.
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