Patch licensing question

[egormanga]

When I contribute a patch via a PR under the CLA, do I retain the right to co-license the same patch under an appropriate Open Source license when (if) applied to an AGPL-ed revision of SpacetimeDB (as per BSL Change Date or revision's fourth anniversary clause)?

That is, given that:

Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license

(emphasis mine), does ‘non-exclusive’ here imply the abovesaid, or anything else does (if any)?

A bit of context:

I'd like to maintain a ‘community fork’ off of a 4-year-old AGPL'ed revision of SpacetimeDB, updating it as the time goes to newer AGPL'ed revisions, with some of my own [already or yet to be] mainlined patches applied in advance.

[cloutiertyler]

If you are asking if you retain the right to reuse his own contributions, including in downstream AGPL forks, so long as you wait until the relevant SpacetimeDB release has converted under the Change Date and comply with AGPL’s open-source requirements. The answer is yes, we don't stop that from happening so long as they wait for the change date, the fork is AGPL compliant and they don't use other contributors materials.

[egormanga]

Tyler, thank you for the response, but I believe your answer is partially copy-pasted (the pronouns are incoherent), thus would love to hear a more direct one, if that is possible.

That said, this isn't exactly what I asked, either. Let me put this in simpler words:

• I want to know if I retain a right to apply my today's patches, that are submitted under CLA, to an older, AGPL-converted version of SpacetimeDB, and license the resulting work under AGPL

[cloutiertyler]

@egormanga You are correct, I copied from our lawyer because I didn't want to misrepresent.

That is a great question, and I don't know the answer to it. Let me consult the lawyers again.

[cloutiertyler]

Okay I have an answer.

The short answer is that you can think of the CLA as giving us a license to use (and potentially relicense) your code in our latest version of SpacetimeDB. Technically it's joint ownership, but that is functionally a non-exclusive license (we can both use the contributed code), rather than an exclusive license (only Clockwork Labs can use the contributed code). It does not transfer the rights of your code to Clockwork Labs.

In other words, you retain the rights to the contributions you make, and can thus contribute them to any version of SpacetimeDB that has already converted to the AGPL license without issue (provided you abide by the terms of the AGPL license).

[egormanga]

Thank you, I appreciate it! Will do :)