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Comment by harry8 | Hacker News Reader

They want you to contribute but you have to assign microsoft your copyright and give them a guarantee in case anyone sues microsoft over your work. (People sue without merit literally all the time and legal fees are bankruptcy material for any individual).

No, flipping, thanks.

Surely microsoft can, you know, pay you for the copyright if they want own it when they decide to merge your work? Or just take it on the same license. And as far as providing legal guarantees for microsoft? Yeah that's gonna be a no from any sane individual. Perhaps a big company like google might agree to those terms but also, perhaps not.

So no they don't want you to contribute, at all, or they'd do it right.

This looks quite disappointing. But as noted elsewhere you can read some source, or fork and refuse to contribute back I guess... But why?

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> you have to assign microsoft your copyright

No, you don't. You have to provide Microsoft (and anyone else, for that matter) a license to use your contribution per the CLA, but you still own your work. See section 5(a), https://opensource.microsoft.com/pdf/microsoft-contribution-....

All open-source licenses effectively require this; otherwise, by default, nobody would have a right to copy or use your contribution.

> give them a guarantee in case anyone sues microsoft over your work

I don't see an indemnification clause in the CLA. Which language are you referring to?

> (People sue without merit literally all the time and legal fees are bankruptcy material for any individual)

If they had even a shred of plausible belief, the estate of Elvis Presley could sue you tomorrow for defecating on a sofa at Graceland and potentially bankrupt you, even if you've never visited. What's your point?

Release your patch on the same license as the project. The End. Everyone is granted a license to the patch under that license. Nobody can take your code and re-license under a non-compatible license.

"a. Copyright License. You grant Microsoft, and those who receive the Submission directly or indirectly from Microsoft, a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable license in the Submission to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, and distribute the Submission and such derivative works, and to sublicense any or all of the foregoing rights to third parties. "

The project has a license, just use it.

You realize most FSF projects have similar copyright assignments, right?

I have never been asked for a copyright assignment by the FSF for a patch. Maybe that happens and if and when it does I'd talk about that too.

https://lwn.net/Articles/359013/

This is hardly a dangerous, radical criticism that is novel and needs to be fought on all fronts...

How big and/or complicated have your patches been? Copyright assignment is not necessary for not-legally significant changes: https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Legally-Sign...

Copyright assignment has long been used as an argument of why not to contribute to FSF projects, and is arguably one of the reasons that Clang/LLVM were able to garner contributions from a much broader set of folks.

You realize that FSF is in a different league of trustworthiness than Microsoft, right?

None of this is particularly unusual in a FOSS project, and is done for good reasons.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html

... and Microsoft's CLA is even less demanding; all they require is a copyright and patent license.

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