JQuery dropping GPL from licence requires CLA , Big corporations hand?
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They require CLA, so that they can put the code under MIT. It's legal silliness, but how is it at all bad?
Also requiring the CLA to put the code under MIT makes zero sense to me. They could use the CLA to do a lawsuit, but why would they ever bother suing over MIT-licensed code?
JQuery is adding a copyright license requirement, not a copyright assignment requirement. You do not transfer your copyright to them. All you do is give them a license.
The FSF needs an assignment because, as you implied, they foresee the need to sue to enforce the GPL. By owning the entire copyright, they avoid some troublesome issues of standing to sue.
The JQuery people, as you note, are unlikely to ever need to sue to enforce the MIT license. Hence, they do not need to require copyright assignment.
The JQuery contributor license does a few things useful to the JQuery project. Others have mentioned some of them already, so I'll just add one that I don't think anyone else has mentioned: It specifies that JQuery gets an irrevocable license to use the code. There's a popular belief that once someone releases something under an open source license, they cannot revoke that license. As far as I can tell, there is little or no legal support for that belief.
Suppose I release something under an open source license. You grab a copy and start using it in accord with that license. You are copying it, making derivative works, and distributing copies of the original and/or your derivative works.
Alice gets one of those copies from you. Alice wants to distribute copies and derivative works, so she also needs a license. Who can give her a license?
She got the software from you, so maybe you can give her a license. With some licenses, you can. The MIT license, for example, specifically says you can sublicense. Unfortunately, some popular free/open licenses do not allow sublicensing. If the software is under one of those, Alice will have to get her license from me.
So suppose that after you received your license, I announced that I am no longer giving out any new licenses. If Alice gets her copy from you after that, we are in interesting territory. You've got a license, so I think you are probably safe to continue distributing the software, although again, the devil will be in the details. Let's make it simple and assume the license said it was irrevocable so we don't have to worry about your license.
Since Alice did not get a copy until after I had announced I would no longer grant licenses, my position when I sue Alice for copyright infringement will be that my putting the software up under an open source license was an offer to form a licensing contract with anyone who obtained the software, where acceptance of the offer and contract formation occurs when someone obtains the software. Offers usually can be withdrawn before acceptance, and that's what I did.
Maybe the license agreement you have with me can help Alice. If the license said that you could distribute the software and the recipients received a license from me, then you might be able to sue me claiming that by not giving Alice a license I am in breach of the contract between you and me. That will be an interesting case.
If you do win, that's not the end of the interesting and fun arguments. The court will have to fashion a remedy for you. Will they order me to give Alice a license? Or will they limit you to collecting damages? If the former, do I just have to license it to people who like Alice get it from people who got licenses from me before I stopped giving new licenses, or do I have to license it to people who get it from Alice later? If the court goes for damages, it will be fun to try to figure out the monetary damages of me not licensing your recipients to modify and redistribute the code.
Unfortunately, not many free/open licenses actually state they are irrevocable. The Apache 2 license does. It also says that you can sublicense. This seems pretty safe. People who receive the software before a revocation attempt are covered by the irrevocability, and people afterward can be covered by a sublicense from someone in the first group.
GPLv3 also says that it is irrevocable. However, it quite adamantly insists that you cannot sublicense it. It instead explicitly says that when you copy a GPLv3 program the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensors. This is not as good as Apache. It's basically the situation I describe in the Alice hypothetical.
The MIT license says you can sublicense, but does not say it is irrevocable. Also not as good as Apache. If my software is MIT license, I might be able to revoke the license I gave you, but Alice might be safe as she got her license as a sublicense from you. (Whether or not a court might find an implicit irrevocability clause in a license is yet another interesting issue that will come up should someone try to revoke one of these licenses).
Sadly, many licenses mention neither irrevocability nor sublicensing. GPLv2 goes even farther into risky territory, not saying it is irrevocable and explicitly disallowing sublicensing.
Really? Really? You think that's okay to post on this forum? You are seriously that one-sided that you can't even be happy with dual licensing?
This is why we can't have nice things.
edit:
WTF? Do you people even know what dual licensing means? It means it's a choice! Choose MIT! Choose GPL! You choose the end license when you use it as a library.
Why would a CLA help with that? Since all existing code is already licensed under MIT, and for future code they can just refuse to merge anything not under MIT. The only use a CLA has is if anyone thought the MIT restrictions were too harsh, but I cannot see when that would be the case. You can do almost anything with MIT licensed code.
also I know this is getting into inflammable territory but the GPL (v3 especially) is a very big turn off to adoption for a lot of for-profit companies due to worries that if they use the GPL code, their product and all derivative works are "tainted" (need to provide 'free' source access)
Thus I can see the removal of GPL as being a clarifying factor, as lots of companies dual license GPL and a proprietary license, which may lead to misunderstanding in this case.
The license itself is what normalizes the copyrights, so a CLA is just additional bureaucracy. The contributors to jQuery have already all agreed to contribute their code under MIT, so why would they need to do it again?
Imagine that some employee of a company writes some nifty code and submits a pull request to jQuery. We land that code and six months later the company finds out. They're shocked, shocked that the employee wrote that code on company time and just gave it to us, especially because it was based on one of their super-secret header files and patented algorithms. They insist that we remove it immediately and remove that version from all CDNs. So we do. And everyone using that code has a broken site.
Now of course, that could still happen with a CLA in place, but only if the contributor lies or there is a misunderstanding between employer and employee. We're not seeking ironclad protection here, only reasonable due diligence.
Define your terms. "significantly more free" is a nonsense statement. At least the FSF has a strong definition of "free". I haven't seen anything nearly as compelling from any other Free software communities.
Given that jQuery was distributed under a dual MIT/GPL license this has basically no effect on anything anyway.
The FSF's own Free Software Definition includes the MIT license. The MIT license also provides additional freedoms not required by the FSD.
With GPL, you must share derived source.
With MIT, you can share derived source.
Therefore, MIT is more free than GPL.
Also, the fact the FSF has its own definition of words "free" and "freedom" doesn't make that others are not free to use the more common meaning of the word. Free != "free"
In this case it looks like jQuery was previously dual-license MIT-and-GPL, so anybody who contributed to it was saying "you can use these changes under either MIT or GPL". That means it's entirely OK for the project to switch to "just MIT", because "MIT" was an option all those contributors were permitting already.
Dual licensing confused people for no good reason. Some people thought that including jQuery in their own projects would somehow apply the GPL on their project, since that was one of the licenses. The idea of choosing one license and not the other seemed odd, and most people are just users (not derivative work creators) so it doesn't even affect them.
> Some users were surprised by the change
Nobody has expressed surprise anywhere but the few people who posted here without reading the original post. The link to the bug tracker wasn't a user surprised by the change, it was someone simply reporting that we'd forgotten to remove the GPL from one of about two dozen pages where we had it mentoned. That's fixed now.
> A search of the site shows that details of the actual agreements are not currently available.
The only reason we didn't link the CLA or CAA is because it contains a form that the contributor submits and we don't want a bunch of crap posted back to us by people who aren't contributors. dave1010uk posted a link to the text below, and I've added a todo to make that text available on another page.
it's because contributor work is under it's own copyright, per individual. This is a huge legal (bureaucratic) issue and thus the CLA is meant to normalize all contributions to fall under the MIT
disclaimer: I'm not related with jQuery, this is based on my prior knowledge of open source contribution legal issues.
Lacking a CLA means one less hurdle for new developers. The advantage of a CLA is that you can change license, but if you are MIT licensed you can already change to almost any license without requiring any approval from the community. CLA:s only make sense for very strict licenses.
It means that no single zealot or bad apple can stop the code from being used in ways the users want.
E.g like this Rémi Denis-Courmont guy, a VLC contributor working for Nokia, killed the iOS VLC port for violating some GPL technicalities, despite the code being available, the users wanting it, and the team porting it to iOS for free.
And you still get GPL with their MIT licence: "The Foundation confirms that with the MIT licence, if someone desires GPL licensing, they are free to make changes and re-license it under the GPL."
Denis-Courmont may have licensed his code under GPL for a reason, but it can very well be a bad, zealous reason. Indeed, I would expect that almost every person who truly is a zealot and a bad apple would choose to license their code under GPL. The GPL is a license that demands total obedience to a particular ideology of software distribution, and requiring that other people obey your ideology in every detail is the defining characteristic of a zealot.
Gee, I don't know. Maybe for the good of the hundreds of thousands of users of iOS/VLC? Maybe because the other contributors had agreed to this and didn't care for the technical violation, especially since both the code was available and the app was free? Maybe because also working for Nokia seems like a huge conflict of interest?
In this particular case, anyone that was already capable of running code they compiled on an iphone (read: people with a developer license) was also capable of making and using modified versions of VLC.
Whether or not you agree with copyleft licenses, how can you sit there and say that someone is a zealot for wanting to enforce the terms under which they licensed their work?
Besides, it was Apple that removed the software rather than modify the terms of their distribution to allow for GPL software.
1) Because for a pragmatic (not zealot) guy, the license is just a practicality, not the be all end all. If the license gets in the way of the work getting used, so much worse for the license.
2) Because if we are 10 contributors to a program, have picked GPL, but have no problem with the app being available on the App Store, and some other contributors even do the hard porting work for free, then I could call the 1 of us who disagrees and destroys everything a zealot.
3) In the general case, because the use of GPL for a project could have just as well come from external factors and not because the contributors have some grant vision about GPL/FOSS software. E.g because a few underlying libs they had to use were GPL themselves. In that case, I'd absolutely despise some idiot taking advantage of that to force the hands of the other contributors/users.
Hang on a minute. What you're trying to push aside as a technicality has been a recurring sore point between Apple's App Store and the FOSS community, and Denis-Courmont is far from the only person who has been upset by attempts to distribute GPL'd software via the App Store under terms are incompatible with both the letter and the spirit of the GPL. [1]
But in this case, since we're talking about an MIT licence, it's hard to see how the CLA makes any sense. What can it possibly allow anyone to do to anyone or with anything that they couldn't already do anyway under the MIT licence? They could release the code under a licence that doesn't even require the credit/copyright/disclaimer, I suppose, but those aren't exactly a heavy burden. Other that that, the whole point of licences like the MIT ones is basically to avoid having the kinds of restrictions that would ever result in copyright enforcement action, so it's not like you need a single party with standing to sue or issue takedown notices, for example. I don't see what anyone gains by having this extra hoop for contributors to jump though.
[Edit: Someone posted the actual text of the CLA. It seems to address significantly more that just transferring rights to the jQuery Foundation, so there may or may not be sneaky legal shenanigans going on here that I wasn't considering above.]
[1] http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-...
What I find strange about the CLA is that I don't understand the reason behind it. With a solely-GPL project, I could understand an agreement like the FSF's, which has practical advantages such as a single party asserting the license terms if a third party breaks them, while promising the code will not be used in proprietary software against the author's wishes. But in this case, if the code is under the MIT license, third parties can already use the code in their proprietary code, so the agreement doesn't gain anything. So, what's the point?
One big bad example of CLA abuse to me is Sun's OpenSolaris CLA which allowed Oracle to take external contributions and turn Solaris back to proprietary software.
So it's not exactly FUD about the GPL. Companies can have very legitimate reasons for wanting to stay away from it. I would call it a more general legal ignorance on the companies' parts with pragmatism on jquery's.