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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

> For a start, anyone contributing to AMP is required to sign a contributor license agreement (CLA) for their code to be accepted into the project

This is pretty standard. You have to sign one to contribute to Emacs.

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I noticed this too, and immediately thought of the FSF. But I kept reading and thought this was different:

> Note, you don’t grant these rights to the AMP Project, you grant them to Google. Google owns the code and patents.

This is standard. Copyrights are assigned to the body that owns the project. For EMACS this is FSF, for AMP this is Google. The only time it's something different is if a project is owned by a foundation just for that project but super common in the OSS world. Have you done much OSS development?

What license is AMP ... GPLV ? BSD ? MIT ?

AMP's license is technically Apache 2.0, but functionally, AMP's license is irrelevant. The only AMP code that matters is the code implemented on Google's servers for serving search results, as that is what everyone must comply with to be placed well on Google. Nothing about openness or transparency or governance of the project actually matters, because the issue is how AMP is used by Google on Google servers.

Why don't projects let you sign away your copyright so your contribution becomes public domain? Is that even possible?

In many countries authors aren't allowed to put the code under the public domain. To avoid these issues it is instead preferred to provide an explicit copyright license.

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1371/

One very important difference is that the FSF is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and the terms of its charter and of the copyright assignment state that the software must remain free in the future. Effectively, the only thing the CLA does is make it easier for the FSF to enforce the GPL on behalf of the developers.

On the other hand, in AMP's case the CLA allows Google to start distributing the software under a proprietary license in the future, if they so desire.

One example of this difference was the time when Gitlab stopped requiring a CLA, after being prompted to do so by the Debian project: https://about.gitlab.com/2017/11/01/gitlab-switches-to-dco-l...

It does, however, contradict Google's insistence that the AMP project is independent form Google.

I have done quite a bit of open source stuff and so far I gave manged to avoid projects which require a CLA. In my experience the projects with a CLA are a minority.

"Standard" != right.

When you contribute to Ubuntu or related you sign away to Canonical. It makes sense.

that can be done in amarica, not here

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