In the last few years I have come across the CLA topic several times. It is and will be a popular topic in automotive the coming years, like in any industry that moves from being an Open Source Producer towards becoming an Open Source Contributor.

In my experience, many organizations take the CLA as a given by looking at the google, microsoft or intels of the world and replicate their model. But more and more organizations are learning about alternatives, even if they do not adopt them.

What I find interesting about discussing the alternatives is that it brings to the discussion the contributor perspective and not just the company one. This enrichs the debate and, in some cases, leads to a more balanced framework between any organization behind a project and the contriibutor base, which benefits both.

Throughout these years I have read a lot about it but I have never written anything. It is one of those topics I do not feel comfortable enough to write about in public probably because I know lots of people more qualified than I am to do so. What I can do is to provide some articles and links that I like or that have been recommended to me in the past.

Articles

DCO

It is impossible nowadays to talk about CLAs without talking about DCO (Developer Certificate of Origin). Here are some articles that I find interesting:

For companies that “do not buy into the anti-CLA” case, R. Fontana propose another two options:

Eclipse Contributor Agreement The Software Freedom Conservancy’s Selenium CLA, which are not proper CLAs but DCOs in his view.

FLA

It is always interesting to learn about the Fiduciary License Agreement FLA, developed by the FSFE:

Inbound = outbound

A serious conversation about CLA requires to understand the concept of inbound=outbound:

GitHub explains inbound=outbound as:

“outbound licensing”, refers to granting a licence to another party to use, copy, distribute…. (depending on the license) your intellectual property.

”inbound licensing” means obtaining a licence from another party, to use, copy, distribute…. (depending on the license) its IP for your own consumption (distribution, etc. again depending on the license).

GitHub explains inbound=outbound as:

“Whenever you make a contribution to a repository containing notice of a license, you license your contribution under the same terms, and you agree that you have the right to license your contribution under those terms.[…]“

In the CLA discussion context, the general idea behind inbound=outbound is that the project should make evident to every contributor the contribution conditions, including those related with licenses rights and restriction. The contributor will then contributes her code with the same license, giving little room for later claims, either by the project, the contributor or third parties, based on those conditions being unclear or not easily reachable.

The project license and its description should be prominent and located at least where it is common practice in Open Source to find them. The same applies to all the assumptions and conditions affecting the contributors and the project in this area.

Common practice, many will claim, but sadly some projects are better than others on this.

Who is doing what?

In CLA discussions, it helps to know what others are doing. Here you have some links I have collected over the years and I still find relevant. I have to recognise that in a couple of cases cases I do not remember exactly why they called my attention at the time.

Company driven projects:

Consortium driven projects:

Community driven projects

Organizations with different agreements for individuals and entities:

Organizations with CLA:

Additional links

And finally, I have several links that I think are worth reading for different reasons:

Project Harmony is worth investigating as an interesting attempt to standardize CLAs:

2. GitHub uses an Individual and an entity CLA. It is interesting their CLA-assistant.

3. James Bottomley’s ideas about the Corporate Contribution Pledge published back in 2016 as complement to the DCO are worth reading.

Additional suggestions from readers

I hope my effort triggers the contributor in you so you provide additional links or challenge the ones above. I will substitute this text for those links you provide, obviously giving you credit by default. It would be a great way to help others in the future. Thank you very much in advance.