[TYPO3-50-general] Contributing to TYPO3 v5 / FLOW3: License Agreement

Steffen Müller typo3 at t3node.com
Tue Apr 29 20:33:04 CEST 2008


Hi Robert,

thank you for your explanation.

On 29.04.2008 16:57 Robert Lemke wrote:
> 
> I admit that this legal stuff is not really fun to deal with. We 
> discussed among the
> active members if the text could be simplified or use better wording but 
> then decided
> in favour of using the original text from the Apache Foundation to keep 
> ourselves from
> legal trouble.

Well, the fact that the Apache Foundation wrote that thingi does not at 
all imply that you won't get legal trouble.
On the other hand, I wonder how many "already-contributors" could get 
legal trouble, because signing the association contract conflicts their 
employee contracts.
But this question was not my intention.

> 
> The reason why GPL is not mentioned in the CLA is that it has nothing to 
> do with it.
> The agreement is a contract between you and the Association in which you 
> allow the
> Association to use your contribution in any way which is conform to the 
> Association's
> goal as a non-profit organisation and Open Source project.
> 
> This implies that the Association could at a later point decide to 
> license TYPO3 under
> GPL v3 or FreeBSD license or whatever makes most sense. Without having a 
> CLA with all
> contributors, the license practically can never be changed again. Even 
> dual licensing
> would be possible.

and even commercial licencing? I know this is pure theoretical, but then 
could happen. Is there some point in the contract that prevents 
contributors from non open source licences? I couldn't find one.

Don't get me wrong, I strongly believe in you and the association. But 
the freedom of writing the GPL below my modest lines of contributed code 
seems to me far more satisfying than shifting the responsibility upon 
the associations shoulders.

> 
> All this is quite important because we hope that parts of TYPO3 (such as 
> FLOW3) will
> be used by many people and some of them might not be able to use for 
> example GPL v3
> licensed code (because they are using a more liberate license which is 
> not compatible).

So you could use GPL2 which is quite fair for most people. I don't see 
the problem here. We have tons of sucessful and widely used open source 
projects using GPL2, including TYPO3.

> 
> Does that shed some light on the mumbo-jumbo?
> 

it's light on the decision process. The jumbo is still there. But I have 
to admit, legal stuff is in almost any case jumbo. ;-)

One more question:
What about extensions/components in v.5? It sounds like extension 
developers also have to sign that contract.

-- 
cheers,
Steffen


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