POSS Chap 9 Part 9

There are three ways to handle copyright ownership of free code contributed to by many people. The first is to ignore the issue of copyright entirely (I don't recommend this). The second is to collect a contributor license agreement (CLA) from each person who works on the project, explicitly granting the project the right to use that person's code. This is usually enough for most projects, and the nice thing is that in some jurisdictions, CLAs can be sent in by email. The third way is to get actual copyright assignments from contributors, so that the project (i.e., some legal entity, usually a nonprofit) is the copyright owner for everything. This is the most legally airtight way, but it's also the most burdensome for contributors; only a few projects insist on it.

This is a license agreement only; it does not transfer copyright ownership and does not change your rights to use your own Contributions for any other purpose. Here are some examples:

    • Individual contributor CLAs:
       • http://apache.org/licenses/icla.txt
       • http://code.google.com/legal/individual-cla-v1.0.html
    • Corporate contributor CLAs:
       • http://apache.org/licenses/cla-corporate.txt
       • http://code.google.com/legal/corporate-cla-v1.0.html

Copyright transfer means that the contributor assigns to the project copyright ownership on her contributions. Ideally, this is done on paper and either faxed or snail-mailed to the project. Some projects insist on full assignment because having a single legal entity own the copyright on the entire code base can be useful if the terms of the Open Source license ever need to be enforced in court. If no single entity has the right to do it, all the contributors might have to cooperate, but some might not have time or even be reachable when the issue arises. Different organizations apply different amounts of rigor to the task of collecting assignments. Some simply get an informal statement from a contributor on a public list mailing list—something to the effect

   Most projects have a single legal entity own the copyright on the entire code base. This is done for vari-
   ous reasons. If the terms of the copyright ever need to be defended or enforced in court, it's much easier
   if a single entity has the right to do so; otherwise, all of the contributors would have to cooperate, and
   some might not have time or even be reachable when the issue arises. Also, if the code is the target of a
   copyright infringement suit, you wouldn't want the individual developers to be personally exposed to li-
   ability.
   Remember that centralized ownership of the copyright does not make the code any less free. Open
   source licenses do not give the copyright holder the right to retroactively proprietize all copies of the
   code. Even if the copyright-holding entity suddenly turned around and started distributing all the code
   under a restrictive license, it wouldn't cause a problem for the public project. The other developers
   would simply start a fork based on the latest free copy of the code, and continue as if nothing had
   happened. Because they know they can do this, most developers do not object when asked to assign
   copyright to some sponsoring organization.
   Different organizations apply different amounts of rigor to the task of collecting copyright assignments.
   For most, simply getting an informal statement from a contributor on the public list is
   enough—something to the effect of "I hereby assign copyright in this code to the project, to be licensed
   under the same terms as the rest of the code." At least one lawyer I've talked to says that's really enough,
   presumably because it happens in a context where copyright assignment is normal and expected anyway,
   and because it represents a bona fide effort on the project's part to ascertain the developer's true inten-
   tions. On the other hand, the Free Software Foundation goes to the opposite extreme: they require con-
   tributors to physically sign and mail in a piece of paper containing a formal statement of copyright assignment, 
   sometimes for just one contribution, sometimes for current and future contributions. If the developer is employed,
   the FSF asks that the employer sign it too.The FSF's paranoia is understandable. If someone violates the terms of 
   the GPL by incorporating some of their software into a proprietary program, the FSF will need to fight that in court, and they want their
    copyrights to be as airtight as possible when that happens. Since the FSF is copyright holder for a lot of
    popular software, they view this as a real possibility. Whether your organization needs to be similarly