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How do I make contributors to my project transfer copyright to me? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Is there a pull request template that does this?

Edit: I was worried about possibly needing to change license. For now I will just use a permissive license. The situation is made seemingly complicated by the possible need to use copylefted images, combined with the possible need for using server code (which shouldn't use creative commons) in addition to the static html. I would rather deal with including parts with different licenses (probably not as complicated as I initially thought) instead of contributor license agreements.

Edit 2: Also, license enforcement is not very important for my project.

Edit 3: Now I'm using creative commons zero and making the repo comply with https://reuse.software/

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

If you want that, you’ll get fewer contributors, but just make that explicitly clear in your pull request template.

Personally, I would never contribute to a project where the maintainer demanded I transfer copyright ownership of my contributions. I also wouldn’t use a project that did that, and would advise other people to not use that project either.

[–] SuperFola 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I understand the philosophy of not wanting to transfer your rights, but I don't understand what's bad about contributing to a project and having your code given to the community (as-in copyright transfer to the organisation). Would this be because the org/owner can just start selling the code or is there something that I'm missing?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It would mean that the owner could take that code and make it closed source. They could do literally anything they wanted with it, because they would own the copyright.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

They can't make it closed source retroactively (well, technically you can design a license like that but that's a different discussion and the most widely used open source licenses aren't made like that). They can relicense at some point going forward, but all the code up to that point would still be available under the old license and contributors could fork and continue without batting an eye.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

It depends on what license the project is using. Some licenses are very permissive, meaning there's lots of ways they can be abused. For example with MIT/BSD licenses there's no provision to share the code with the final product so they could drag their feet releasing parts of the code or hide them altogether. They could also resort to tivoization, NDAs, commercial plugins and all kinds of shenanigans.

Look for example to the Plex and Emby projects which were originally open and went commercial later. The way they did it is why there's a lot of bad blood in the community to this day.

I've also personally been involved with other projects where someone tried to take them commercial in a less than graceful way, shall we say. It's never pretty.

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