Revision as of 14:03, 21 October 2007

This page is set up to collect thoughts about the need for OpenOffice.org to have some form of Contributor Agreement (CA), and to debate the merits of the current (October 2007) Joint Contributor Agreement (JCA) versus the proposed Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA)

What is a CA

A CA is a document which contributors must sign before they are permitted to make a contribution to an open-source project. By signing a CA, the contributor agrees to share some of their rights as a creator with a 'copyright steward' for the project.

Typically a CA covers contributions of source code, but may also be extended to cover translations, documentation, etc.

Advantages of CAs

With a CA, the copyright steward can:

• be confident they have the rights to distribute the entire code base
• represent the entire code base against legal challenges
• relicense the whole code base as necessary to adapt to changing community needs, new licences, etc
• consolidate code from different communities to permit use of the same code under different licenses

For contributors, a CA:

• requires contributors to warrant that they hold the rights to their contributions, and that, to their knowledge, their contribution does not violate anyone else's rights
• allows dual-licensing to parties (such as corporations) who are unwilling to open-source license, but are willing to work through the steward
• allows the original donor to offer their code as a commercial product

Disadvantages of CAs

• CAs are a barrier to contributors and may discourage individuals or corporations from contributing
• CAs require administrative effort to maintain
• A CA is only as good as its copyright steward. The governance of the copyright steward function may be a matter of contention among contributors.

JCA compared to SCA

As the Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA) is used by Sun for current projects, it has been suggested that this will be used by OpenOffice.org as well.

For details Sun Contributor Agreement FAQ

Netbeans Project has a page that compares SCA to JCA.

Projects using SCA

• NetBeans
• OpenSolaris

Advantages of SCA

From a blog by Simon Phipps:

• it does not require the contributor to surrender their copyright. They share their rights instead and retain the freedom to do whatever they want with the code contribution.
• it has several layers of agreement, so that if one proves to be unenforceable in some jurisdiction, there are other layers to ensure the community still has aggregated rights.
• There is an "open source covenant" - Sun promises that any contributions that get used will always remain as Free software wherever else they may end up, so that proprietary-only forks are impossible.

Disadvantages of SCA

• The SCA covers not just source code, but any other materials like documentation, design specs, bug fixes, or graphics

list of similar agreements

agreements with Copyright assignment

• Individual Contributor License Agreement ("Agreement") V2.0

• MySQL MySQL Contributor License Agreement

• several FSF projects, such as gnulib

agreements without Copyright assignment (but precondition to submit code)

• Mozilla CVS Contributor Form (no copyright assignment but declaration of legal compliance)

• Eclipse Member Committer Agreement (no copyright assignment but declaration of legal compliance)