Ultimately, it is possible to have a successful and sustainable open source project without CLA. However, it is not possible to have a successful or sustainable open source project without a large influx of new contributors. One way to manage contribution rights is a contributor license agreement (CLA), sometimes referred to as a Contribution Agreement. However, within the open source community, there are some differences of opinion on whether a CLA should be requested from individual contributors. A CLA can be used to define legal terms, such as contributor rights and obligations, that apply to contributions (usually software) to the open source project. For example, the CLA may require the contributor to grant a copyright license to contribute to the open source project, its maintainers, and/or downstream recipients. Since AOPs are not standardized, contributions to different open source projects may be subject to different CLAs, if at all. While small, informal open source projects may not require a CSA, for example. B for leisure groups that coordinate through a GitHub repository, larger projects, often supported by one or more companies, may require formal cla agreements from their contributors. Several well-known open source projects like the Apache Software Foundation, Django Software Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, to name a few, require ASAs.

As we saw above, a CLA is essentially a legal contract that can be adapted for a particular open source project. While the CLA may define certain rights and obligations for a contributor based on their contribution to an open source project, it may also contain restrictions on how the project itself can authorize and distribute the contribution. The contributor conferred copyright on Canonical and, at the same time, Canonical gave the contributor “a worldwide, non-exclusive, free and permanent right to use, copy, modify, communicate and communicate the allocated contributions (including, but not limited to, the Internet), and to disseminate the allocated contributions in an initial or modified form, how (they) desire it. [35] [36] The requirement for a licensing agreement for contributors is a sign that you intend to maintain your project over the long term with responsible IP management practices. Responsible open source developers are not afraid to sign licensing agreements for contributors: they simply understand the legal implications of transmitting source code to the rest of the world. To illustrate the intellectual property license granted by contributions from a natural or legal person, Google LLC (“Google”) must have a Contributor License Agreement (“CLA”) signed by each contributor and certifying that it complies with the following license terms. . . .