[gumby]

TL;DR: my quick read is that they are trying to do the right thing.

My not super-close reading is that this is actually reasonable (but note: I wrote the original GNU blanket assignment back around 1989 or 1990 so you may consider my perspective bogus).

This agreement says that you confirm that you have the right to license your contribution (that what you wrote isn’t actually your employer’s), and that they can use it without restriction, even if there’s something patented in the submission. It doesn’t stop you from using the code for something else. But you can’t come back later and say “hey, yank out these lines of code which I sent you long ago”. It's not even an assignment -- you retain ownership.

If I were doing this, personally, I might add something to the effect of “btw if the company tries to change the license in a way incompatible with the AGPL 3.0 or later versions this license I have you becomes void” but that could implicitly be in there (if explicit, I missed it in my quick read).

[dns_snek]

Interesting. I think concerns about legality of contributions are completely understandable.

But doesn't this CLA in particular (and most CLAs out there generally) assign the company behind it a license to distribute all contributions under any license they wish? Specifically the part that I quoted where contributors give them an "irrevocable copyright license" to "sublicense" their contributions?

As far as I understand, this allows them to unilaterally re-license the project as a whole (to proprietary or non-free open source) without asking contributors for permission.

The only way I'd agree to a CLA is if it included explicit language that ensured that they couldn't do this, e.g. "You hereby grant [...] under the terms of the AGPL v3 license", but I'm not a lawyer.

[the_mitsuhiko]

> As far as I understand, this allows them to unilaterally re-license the project as a whole (to proprietary or non-free open source) without asking contributors for permission.

That's generally how CLAs work, to enable re-licensing. For many commercial AGPL projects that's also needed because the copyright holding entity will sell/provide non AGPL versions to customers that legally cannot use AGPL software.

[thisislife2]

> But doesn't this CLA in particular (and most CLAs out there generally) assign the company behind it a license to distribute all contributions under any license they wish?

Yes. CLA requirements for commercial AGPL open-source projects actually highlights an important feature of the AGPL - you need explicit permission from the developers to use their code in a proprietary codebase.

Codebase under a permissive open-source license like BSD, MIT, ZLIB etc. can be used by anyone and even packaged into a closed source codebase (with a proprietary license) even without a CLA. All that such license demand is that you do not deny public attribution to the developers and highlight the original license (here's an example from the old Opera Presto browser which was a proprietary closed browser with open source components in it - https://imgur.com/a/KDavWLd ). On the other hand, an AGPL codebase cannot be packaged into a proprietary codebase because the license requires not only attribution but also the requirement that the all source code, even the non-AGPL parts, has to be compulsorily shared if you link it with an AGPL codebase (i.e. it forces all code to be always open source).

The underlying philosophy of the xGPL license is the right to repair the software you use. And you can only do that if you have access to the source code of the software. Under AGPL it is illegal to close-source an AGPL codebase. But, AGPL also recognizes the rights of a developer on the code they created. It thus doesn't prevent the original developer from re-licensing their own code or even transferring the rights to another. Thus, in some way, AGPL actually forces the CLA requirement (if you want to distribute a software under proprietary license) and let's the developer decide if they want their code to be reused in a proprietary codebase.