How to retain the rights to sell an open-source project at a later date?

Question

I'm in the process of starting an open-source project aimed at digitising a whole bunch of forms provided by a government department. Basically at the moment if people need to fill out the forms they need to do so on paper, and I'd like to change that so that it can be done on the computer.

At present, the project has no official affiliation with the government and I'd like to set it up in such a way that the public can help contribute to digitising the forms as there are a large number of forms. At some point in the future, the forms may come to be of a standard where it would be feasible that they could be used officially by the government. If this were to be the case, it would be ideal if there was some kind of remuneration, rather than the forms being handed over to the government free of charge.

In such a case, how do you retain authority over where the money goes, given that the project could potentially have had many contributors? Obviously I would like to pass on remuneration to contributors that is based on how much they have each contributed, but is there any legal provisions or statements I would need to have in place to retain the authority to be the person that makes the decisions about who gets what? Is it a simple case of "person that starts the project gets to decide", or would this be in breach of any laws surrounding intellectual property or copyright, given that part of what is sold would be other peoples contributions?

A case (on a much larger scale) similar to mine that I can think of is with Sun buying MySQL - who got to decide where the money from the sale went to, and what did they have to do to retain the authority to make such a decision? As an asides, what did Sun actually get out of purchasing MySQL that they could not have had by simply downloading it, given that it was open source?

Answer 1

Sun, I'm sure, had lawyers. I really suggest you talk to one. They would be able to sort out how to retain some kind of rights over the money so that you (and your contributors) could get remuneration later.

Answer 2

Even open source projects have the concept of copyright.

The code of the project may be open-source but the copyright belongs to someone.

For example most GNU programs belong to the FSF. If you make non-trivial contributions (more than simple patches) they will ask you to give them the copyright of the code.

I suspect this also happens with other big open-source applications (e.g. Mozilla, Eclipse e.t.c).

The controller of the code (and where the money goes to) is the owner of the copyright.

To solve your problem you just ask all contributors to sign papers that assign the copyright of the code to you.

If you later decide to do something else with result you are free to do as you wish since you will be the soler owner of everything.

Answer 3

InterBase is a database system that was branched to an open-source version. Today, it's closed-source again but other developers are continuing to develop the open-source version. The two products are becoming very different nowadays but they have been very similar in the past.

The problem is that the open-source license will stay with that specific source version forever and ever. You can continue to develop your product, adding new features and changing it back to a commercial product again but you would be competing with other developers who might continue to develop on your open-source version. And they hold the copyrights of the modifications they're adding to your project.

Your main problem with turning back your open-source project to a commercial version again are the contributions from other open-source developers. If they gave you feedback and added code to fix certain issues then those changes are copyrighted by them and you can't add them to your commercial version, unless your commercial version continues to be open-source.

Still, a product can be open-source and commercial! Several Linux vendors make big profits doing just this. The profit is from the support they give to users, who are willing to pay for this support. They're not really selling Linux, they're selling support and their services to create an easy-to-install Linux version.

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In your example, you can't turn the project back to closed-source since you're accepting contributions from others. Those would all fall under the open-source license. But you own the copyright and the (trademarked) name, thus you can determine if people can offer commercial support for your product or not. They might have to pay you to use your trademark! The value is not in the code but in the name...

Answer 4

To contribute to OpenJDK, you have to sign a paper that transfers ownership of your code to Sun.

Providing an infrastructure for signing such a form would be a nice start for your digital form management project ;-).