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by lambada 4679 days ago
On the legal question:

As of writing, the Contributing page states: "License

Submitting changes implies granting project a permission to use it under an appropriate license."[0] "license" links to [1] which states (in part):

" * Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without * modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions * are met: * 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. * 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the * documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. " followed by standard liability disclaimer.

There may well be a problem agreeing what "appropriate" means. There's an argument that given the link, appropriate could mean a license that allows redistribution in the same way as the current license - which would raise interesting questions for redistributing the nginx plus version.

Certainly it's not a simple assignation of copyright to NGINX. I can easily imagine a lawyer having a heart-attack when reading the original conditions of submitting.

[0] http://nginx.org/en/docs/contributing_changes.html [1] http://nginx.org/LICENSE

1 comments

That's my point: Without CLA there's enough wiggle room for several armies of lawyers to squeeze through and attack you like a flock of piranhas. The other problem is that contributors might feel cheated - the implied contract was that they contribute to an OS project, not help lift a commercial project off the ground. OTOH, I have no idea how big outside contribution was. It's certainly a little shaky with a lot of pitfalls and I certainly don't hope that anyone feels inclined to challenge the commercial version, but we've all seen how well that went with VLC and the app-store version :(