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Comment by withinrafael | Hacker News Reader

The CLA does not change the copyright owner of the contributed content (https://zed.dev/cla), so I'm confused by the project's comments on copyright reassignment.

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Maybe not technically correct but it's still the gist of this line, no?

> Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, You hereby grant to Company, and to recipients of software distributed by Company related hereto, a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute, Your Contributions and such derivative works (the “Contributor License Grant”).

They are allowed to use your contribution in a derivative work under another license and/or sublicense your contribution.

It's technically not copyright reassignment though.

Yes, you grant the entity you've submitted a contribution to, to use (not own) your contribution in whatever it ends up in. That was the whole point of the developer's contribution right?

The CLA has you granting them a non-open-source license. It permits them to change the Zed license to a proprietary one while still incorporating your contributions. It doesn't assign copyright ownership, but your retaining the ability to release your contribution under a different license later has little practical value.

Isn't that a good thing? As a dev submitting something to them, I want my feature/bugfix to stay with the product.

Are you suggesting that devs should be able to burden the original contribution with conditions, like "they can't use my code without permission 5 years later if you relicense"? That's untenable, isn't it?

I don't know how else you would accept external contributions for software without the grant in the CLA. Perhaps I'm not creative enough!

I submit my code contributions, for free, because I am participating in a collaborative community effort called an Open Source Project. I do not typically contribute to the proprietary codebases of for-profit companies for free; I have a contractor rate for that.

If you say 'that makes it untenable for me to accept your contributions for free, then relicense to proprietary keeping those contributions', well, that's your problem. I don't particularly care about arranging tenable circumstances for you to sell my work under a proprietary license without paying me.

The way you accept external contributions for software without a CLA grant is by not attempting to take the project proprietary, and keeping the open source arrangement forever. I do not see how you could be confused about an open source project staying open source forever while taking open-source-only contributions. That is what almost all open source projects do.

That's a really good point—I hadn't considered it from that angle. Thanks for that perspective.

I'm concerned about relicensing. See HashiCorp.

It may not technically reassign copyright, but it grants them permission to do whatever they want with your contributions, which seems pretty equivalent in terms of outcome.

Yes, you grant the entity you've submitted a contribution to, to use (not own) your contribution in whatever it ends up in. That was the whole point of the developer's contribution right?

Without CLA, they can’t sell, for example, the code under different license, or be an exception themselves for the current GPL license requirements. But yeah, there might be some confusion with terms.

Relevant part:

> 2. Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, You hereby grant to Company, and to recipients of software distributed by Company related hereto, a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute, Your Contributions and such derivative works (the “Contributor License Grant”). Further, to the extent that You participate in any livestream or other collaborative feedback generating session offered by Company, you hereby consent to use of any content shared by you in connection therewith in accordance with the foregoing Contributor License Grant.

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