[strogonoff]

I used to think that copyright is always assigned to the creator, like in Germany, and it appears that I was wrong: according to Wikipedia, at least English law actually defaults (no contract clause needed!) to assigning your copyright to your employer if the contribution was done as part of work for hire. This was a surprise to me but it explained why some OSS projects, like ones by Adobe, require a CLA: many people use their libraries at work, and if someone like that contributes a fix Adobe’s lawyers justifiedly would not want part of their code to be owned by another company.

It is a sad side-effect that assigning away your rights with a CLA to some company also enables some shady behavior[0], but it seems that the possible intent to “to place a rug under the project, so that they can pull at the first sign of a bad quarter” co-exists with a more reasonable desire not to have parts of the codebase that you started and mostly maintain at your own cost owned by a potentially hostile entity.

That said, it’s sad that DCOs are not used instead[1]. IIUC, DCO basically makes it clear that the contributor is the one owning the copyright, eliminating the above issue without enabling the rug-pulling.

[0] https://drewdevault.com/2023/07/04/Dont-sign-a-CLA-2.html

[1] https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/12/DCO.html

[Tomte]

> I used to think that copyright is always assigned to the creator, like in Germany, and it appears that I was wrong: according to Wikipedia, at least English law actually defaults (no contract clause needed!) to assigning your copyright to your employer if the contribution was done as part of work for hire

It‘s basically the same in Germany. Urheberrecht is not the same as copyright, but comprises personal rights and exploitation rights. 99% of questions about Urheberrecht in commercial settings are about exploitation rights, so ~ about copyright in an American sense.

Personal rights (mostly the right to be named) stay with the author and can never be transferred, exploitation rights default to the employer in employment situations (and are usually explicitly transferred in work contracts, to be safe).

[strogonoff]

Copyright is not the same as licensing. There is a big difference between granting your employer a license to your work (or OSS contribution), vs. making them the copyright holder (meaning they actually created the work, and you are entirely out of the picture for all intents and purposes). I’d like a lawyer to chime in regarding this English law.

[KPGv2]

> This was a surprise to me but it explained why some OSS projects, like ones by Adobe, require a CLA: many people use their libraries at work, and if someone like that contributes a fix Adobe’s lawyers justifiedly would not want part of their code to be owned by another company.

A CLA does not affect who owns the code. It only grants the OSS project the right to use the code.

Generally speaking, a CLA will be a non-exclusive license, meaning you can give the OSS project the right to use your code while you also retain the ability to license that code to others as well (as well as continue to use it in your own projects)

[strogonoff]

CLA is about licensing, CTA is about copyright, but legally licensing seems enough to avoid a dispute.

> while you also retain the ability to license that code to others as well

Depends on the license! Always read what you sign. Get a lawyer to read it.

[pabs3]

The DCO does let someone who doesn't own a piece of code to contribute it to a project, they just have to be certain that it is licensed under the license it says it is licensed under.

[strogonoff]

DCO solved the problem of potentially hostile corporate entity owning part of the code.