Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Canada 1081 days ago
They have required contributors to actually sign a CLA since the beginning, so yeah, they do own the copyright.
2 comments

According to the README[1] on their source repository, that is, flatly, untrue.

They say:

> We are very happy that oCIS does not require a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) as it is Apache 2.0 licensed. We hope this will make it easier to contribute code. If you want to get in touch, most of the developers hang out in our rocket chat channel or reach out to the ownCloud central forum.

They also say:

> Some builds of stable ownCloud Infinite Scale releases provided by ownCloud GmbH are subject to an End User License Agreement.

Which seems both reasonable and sensible...

[1](https://github.com/owncloud/ocis/tree/master)

oh, well I stand corrected then. I contributed to ownCloud many years ago and at that time CLAs were required.
This is the main reason I will never donate code to an organization that requires a CLA: it allows them to repurpose your contributions to promote and distribute proprietary software, which is, IMO, the ultimate in ingratitude.

Most orgs that require a CLA are just doing open source cosplay, they don't actually give a fuck about software freedoms.

Maybe someone should harvest all the contributor emails out of the OwnCloud git history and send them a note so that they know what happened as a result of signing their copyrights away.