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hello this is Heather Meeker I'm a lawyer and venture capitalist specializing in open source software this presentation is intended to answer a question I hear a lot particularly from companies who are starting open source projects and the question is do I need a contribution agreement there is a concept that is key to this question inbound and outbound licenses let's make sure we know the difference so the rest of the discussion will make sense to run your project you need to exercise copyrights in code most of that code comes from contributors and you are probably one of those contributors but somehow the copyrights in the code need to get licensed from the contributors to your project on the other hand the recipients of the project need to get rights to the whole project and they need to get those under the open-source license that applies to your project we refer to the grant of rights from contributors to the project as an inbound license because those rights are coming into the project and the open source license as an outbound license because it is giving rights out of the project to the world think about this like water flowing downhill to accomplish our inbound and outbound licensing model we can use one of two approaches inbound equals outbound or a CLA or contribution License Agreement inbound equals outbound is an easy way to set up a project it means that the inbound and outbound licenses are all the same the open source license for the project it's kind of recursive nice and elegant right the other way to run a project is with a CLA this means the rights granted to the project from the contributors are not exactly the same as the ones given to the world from the project as you can guess this only works if the rights granted under the la are greater than or equal to those granted out from the project obviously a project can't grant rights it doesn't have you need enough water for the flow to happen as you know there are two categories of open-source software licenses permissive and copyleft if you need to know more about that or get a refresher about it take a look at my presentation on what is copyleft the open source license you have picked for your project is your outbound license contribution agreements work differently for projects that are made available under permissive and copyleft licenses now permissive licenses are all pretty much the same they allow the recipient of code to do anything with the code subject only to the condition of applying a notice permissive licenses are mostly all compatible with each other and with most other licenses - you probably already knew that but here's something you might not know most contribution licenses are almost identical to permissive open source licenses for example here are the main differences between the licenses in the Apache 2 license and the Apache CLA as you can see the names have been changed but the licenses are basically identical the Apache CLA is by far the most commonly used CLA so if you are considering using a CLA you would probably use one based on the Apache CLA now you can see that if you have a CLA on the inbound side and a permissive license on the outbound side the difference between that and inbound equals outbound is very slim by the way there are some differences but they don't tend to matter to most projects on a practical level and there is a slide on the differences at the end of this presentation so in some if your project uses a permissive license using a CLA doesn't buy you very much now let's talk about projects under copyleft licenses here clas are very different from inbound equals outbound the recursive licensing means that the project can never change its terms to any incompatible license now you might view this as a feature or a bug for contributors this gives them peace of mind that their contributions can never be privatized for projects it means they are locked into the outbound license so using clas for copyleft projects can be very controversial projects have trouble with inbound equals outbound for copyleft projects for various reasons what if you want to change the outbound license from say GPL to LGPL or GPL to only to GPL to plus any later version or GPL to Apache you can't also inbound equals outbound under a copyleft license does not work at all for code that will be put into proprietary products so if you are a private company and you are accepting contributions for your project for which you offer multiple license options such as in a dual licensing model you can't use inbound equals outbound if you decide to use a CLA you can implement it in various ways of course you can always ask contributors to sign a paper the old-fashioned way but you can also use click to accept mechanisms or email exchanges anything that works to form a contract and as I mentioned most clas are basically the Apache CLA with the names changed if you are running a project on github the github Terms of Service help you a bit they baked in licensing equals license out but github also contains some features that can help you automate the process of making the inbound license explicit with your contributors the link for that feature is on this slide it's called the CLA assistant remember I mentioned that clas are not identical to permissive licenses these are some of the differences now most projects run under permissive licenses do not find these differences compelling enough to use a CLA copyleft projects are more likely to do so if you think these differences might apply to you you should really talk to a lawyer this presentation is mainly for the benefit of most projects one last tidbit for this presentation you may have heard of a developer certification of originality or a DCO that's not really a CLA but it's similar in some ways a DCO is usually used with copyleft projects that use license in equals license out it's used for the Linux kernel instead of a CLA the DCO for the Linux kernel mainly consists of a statement that the contribution is the original work of the contributor it doesn't grant any rights that happens in GPL which is the inbound and outbound license for the kernel the Apache CLA in contrast contains a similar statement but also contains the inbound license well that's it for this short presentation on contribution licenses if you would like to know more about open source licensing generally you might want to take a look at my book open source for business you can download a free copy by going to my website at Heather Meeker com clicking on the links tab and following the instructions there as I mentioned I'm also a venture capitalist os s capital is a venture fund that specializes in early-stage investments in commercial open source companies I hope you enjoyed this presentation this is Heather Meeker signing off