what are the rights of contributors to open source projects

Question

What are the rights of contributors to open source projects?

I'm not talking about the project owners or main developers, but about devs who have contributed significant, if clearly minority, parts of code, or who have consistently handed in patches and fixes.

What are their rights to the project? What happens if, say, in a GPL project the project owners start making money to by selling non-GPL licenses to businesses.

Must the rights of contributors be specifically written somewhere or are they implicitly assumed to be ??? from each license, or from what?

Answer 1

Generally, a contributor owns the copyright in their contributions, but licenses some of those rights through a licence like GPL. The project owners could not release with an incompatible licence unless they had secured the necessary rights to do so from contributors.

Some projects will require you to sign an agreement which makes it clear what the project will and will not do with your contributions. Here's some examples

• Sun Contributor Agreement
• Apache Individual Contributor License Agreement
• Python Contributor Agreement

That last one, the Python Contributor Agreement, is a model of simplicity, which boils down to just a few paragraphs:

Contributor understands and agrees that PSF shall have the irrevocable and perpetual right to make and distribute copies of any Contribution, as well as to create and distribute collective works and derivative works of any Contribution, under the Initial License or under any other open source license approved by a unanimous vote of the PSF board. Contributor shall identify each Contribution by placing the following notice in its source code adjacent to Contributor's valid copyright notice: "Licensed to PSF under a Contributor Agreement." The currently acceptable licenses are the Academic Free License v. 2.1 and the Apache License, Version 2.0.

PSF understands and agrees that Contributor retains copyright in its Contributions. Nothing in this Contributor Agreement shall be interpreted to prohibit Contributor from licensing its Contributions under different terms from the Initial License or this Contributor Agreement.

Answer 2

It depends under which limitations you gave your contributions. If you gave it directly to a GPL-project without further notifications, the project-owner can't change the license without asking you. So the commercial fork of the GPL-project either don't contain your contribution or you have to be asked. Some projects let transfer the rights in before, i.e. for contributing to the OpenJDK Sun wants an agreement, that you transfer your rights to the code to them.

Answer 3

Essentially, you own the copyright to code you write, and this is the legal basis for the GPL in the first place. Basically the GPL is a set of conditions under which you licence your code to others.

Legally such code can't be made available under another licence unless you (the copyright holder) release it as such. So a project would have to contact its major contributors before such a thing would be possible.

I don't think small patches get you a foot in the door, though. If you make significant additions to a file you should probably add your name to the Copyright declaration at the top of the code.

And also note that some projects wants contributors to surrender copyright of their code to the project. In this case you may not have control over what happens to your additions.

Please note, IANAL.