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Comment by fluxsauce | Hacker News Reader

> By sending a pull request, you are agreeing to transfer the copyright of your code to Cheng Zhao.

Nope.

Is there any open source project where the author retains copyright?

I mean in this case I'd say the copyright is transferred to a nameless entity, e.g. "the Yue project". IIRC any project with a developer agreement (like Google's) include a transferrence of copyright note.

E.g., Linux and GNOME

> Is there any open source project where the author retains copyright?

Yes. Pretty much all the most successful FOSS projects operate like this by default—there's no central authority and contributors retain their copyright. It's only in the last couple years or so that a weirdly high amount of orgs even started cargo culting the CLA process. And the reason for the CLAs seems to be that this was happening for nascent, quasi-corporate projects from orgs who were making their foray into open source and were under the impression that this is just how everyone else was already doing things. Meanwhile, back in reality, the old standards and posterchildren for open source were actually humming along with no CLA in sight. (E.g., Linux, Mozilla.)

The CLA trend is waning, though, as people realize that they were never necessary, they only really only introduce friction to contribution process, and the only reason anyone ever adopted them was because they were looking around and trying to emulate each other. (You know the phenomenon where someone seems to be famous just for being famous?) Projects that came about during this time (e.g. NodeJS) have actually been getting rid of their CLAs.

EDIT:

> IIRC any project with a developer agreement (like Google's) include a transferrence of copyright note.

This is not true wrt Google. Contributors retain their copyright. Where did you learn otherwise? Comments like this are how famous-for-being-famous happens.

CLA = contributor LICENSING agreement. CLAs don't need to include transfer of copyright.

A CLA is still necessary in some form in this case for the owner of the repo to re-license the product under the commercial dual licensing scheme.

You can transfer the right to publish/sub-license your contributions under their commercial license without transferring copyright.

I don't understand what point you're trying to make. The tone of your comment comes across as if you're refuting/disputing something (that may be implied?) in what I wrote, but I'm not sure what it is.

Your comment conflates CLAs and copyright transfers.

Can you point to where?

While a CLA is necessary for a dual-licensed project, it doesn't have to include a transfer of copyright, and many don't. E.g. Google's doesn't, the one for Python doesn't. On the other side, the ones for MongoDB and the FSF do. (At least MongoDB's is also clever enough to have a fallback to pure licensing, since "transfer of copyright" isn't possible in some jurisdictions)

And of course there are tons of Open-Source projects that don't have CLAs at all.

Don't send a Pull Request, then.

I don't get why you're so attached to a PR you make to another library. So you're not contributing because you want to improve that other library, you're contributing because you want to sue them after so theycan pay you for your share of the project since you've added 10 lines of code?

I guess it is a combination of factors.

As stated else where it seems like author has copied/forked existing project. Then (if I understood the license correctly) you are required to open source your software if you were to use the library, or pay $5k. On top of that if you contribute to the project you sign away your copyright.

If these things are correct it seems like a one hot mess of a project.

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