Products of the Qt Company, notably Qt and QtCreator.
The “Direct action” advice falls apart here: those are big projects relative to the number of people interested in maintaining them. When Qt Company started lagging releases, KDE still didn’t decide to fork.
I’m still kinda interested in forking QtCreator and adding Rust debugging support, but I don’t have enough time to maintain a fork on my own. Any collaborators?
I could contribute patches to downstream distros, but even if they take it, what happens next - what’s the mechanism of change? Will they be interested in maintaining the patches forever? If patches keep appearing, how likely is it that the distro stops accepting them versus convinces the upstream to drop CLA?
I think you could bring up a fork with KDE, they have the labor pool to maintain it. Did they ever discuss this?
Depends on the size of your change. A small patch is more likely to be carried downstream than a bigger change. But if you’re in a position to make bigger changes you might also be in a position to maintain a bigger fork.
I think a serious discussion about a Qt fork could go well with KDE. This is actually a case where I think there does exist a sizable labor pool ready to take on a fork, without having to build it from scratch.
Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, You hereby grant to Open Whisper Systems and to recipients of software distributed by Signal Messenger a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, and distribute Your Contributions and such derivative works, as well as the right to sublicense and have sublicensed all of the foregoing rights, through multiple tiers of sublicensees, provided that in all cases, Signal Messenger will make Your Contributions available under an OSI-approved open source license.
Canonical recently added a CLA to LXD. I imagine there’s other canonical projects with the same.
I find their wording a bit sneaky:
All contributors must sign the Canonical contributor license agreement, which gives Canonical permission to use the contributions. The author of a change remains the copyright holder of their code (no copyright assignment).
It’s the easiest way for you to give us permission to use your contributions. In effect, you’re giving us a licence, but you still own the copyright — so you retain the right to modify your code and use it in other projects.
They make it sound like this is simply required for use, but the actual CLA text is a few pages and far more widespread, including:
(2.1,b) To the maximum extent permitted by the relevant law, You grant to Us a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, irrevocable license under the Copyright covering the Contribution, with the right to sublicense such rights through multiple tiers of sublicensees, to reproduce, modify, display, perform and
distribute the Contribution as part of the Material; […]
and
(2.3) Based on the grant of rights in Sections 2.1 and 2.2, if We include Your Contribution in a Material, We may license the Contribution under any license, including copyleft, permissive, commercial, or proprietary licenses. […]
Their CLA FAQ makes not mention of possible re-licensing.
Some additional context and license info by Stéphane Graber here.
their enforcement of that is unclear to me, btw. the signal-desktop repository has a CI-like check for your commiter e-mail address, but i’ve contributed to their fork of the boring-sys crate (MIT), and tried contributing to libsignal (AGPL-3.0-only!) and their fork of webrtc (BSD-3-Clause) - these PRs were closed, but for completely different reasons, and the CLA wasn’t checked at all in that process. i haven’t signed that CLA as an especially abusive one, since they require providing a physical address and a phone number
There’s Gitea, who require listing “The Gitea Authors” as copyright holder, effectively requiring copyright assignment. (Forgejo does not require such a thing, and is a hard fork of Gitea.)
You hereby grant, and agree to grant, to Deno Land a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, fully-paid, royalty-free, transferable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, and distribute your Contributions and such derivative works, with the right to sublicense the foregoing rights through multiple tiers of sublicensees.
There’s Gitea, who require listing “The Gitea Authors” as copyright holder, effectively requiring copyright assignment.
But that’s not a copyright assignment—it’s just a copyright notice written in a way not to have to deal with (marginally) more useful copyright notices. And it is, btw, the same thing Hare does.
A copyright notice “Copyright $year $name” isn’t entirely meaningless, but does not by itself affect who has copyright.
Personally, I think they’re pretty useless. Using a generalized one, such as “The $name Authors,” admits that.
There’s CyberChef. But I wasn’t about to contribute to a tool by a state signals agency anyway.
Can someone explain why these organizations have CLA’s when they don’t have a dual license option? Does it just leave the door open to a sketchy dual license (or just switching to full proprietary) down the road?
