No mention of CLA's?

[Dieterbe]

Hello,
from what I understand, a CLA is pretty much a necessity for Fair Source (and Source Available) licenses because such a license by itself isn't compatible with anything else, and the commercial FSL restriction may not always apply to outside contributions (it depends on e.g. whether it can be offered stand-alone). (I'm not a lawyer, but I did have a chat with Heather which led me to this conclusion).

I think the Fair Source website, in particular the adoption guide and the FAQ should mention something about CLA's, even if you don't want to explicitly say they're a necessity, it would be appropriate to call out that it needs considering / looking into when adopting Fair Source / FSL.

[ezekg]

There are Fair Source projects like GitButler that explicitly do not require a CLA. So I think this is going to be something each project needs to consider, just like with Open Source. Not really convinced it should be something that lives on the site, but I don't feel strongly about that.

[Dieterbe]

gitbutler seems to base their non-CLA approach on this article - i just skimmed it and it seems that this article talks about CLA's in the context of open source licenses without commercial restrictions. When you introduce non-competes in a license, the license-in=license-out model (without CLA) becomes problematic. paging @schacon , have you looked into this?

[mitsuhiko]

(I'm not a lawyer, but I did have a chat with Heather which led me to this conclusion).

I would love to hear more details about how you came to that conclusion.

I'm not sure if a CLA is required personally (not a lawyer) but generally unsure about these things. Usually all of this only matters if something goes to court or if there is a dispute, and I tend to believe that these things then turn "individually messy" when it happens.

I think it would be challenging however to go too much into the legal aspect as part of this project.

[chadwhitacre]

I think it's at least worth a FAQ. Sentry has a "CLA lite," some boilerplate we add to our PR template (incessantly annoying our own developers sigh). FAQ could be along the lines of:

What about CLAs?
CLAs are something to consider. Some (who?) have them, some (Sentry) have a light-weight approximation, others don't (GitButler). Decide for yourself.

[chadwhitacre]

Definitely need to provide some guidance.

https://x.com/b_shulha/status/1838330021317943631

[ezekg]

I think it's at least worth a FAQ. Sentry has a "CLA lite," some boilerplate we add to our PR template (incessantly annoying our own developers sigh). FAQ could be along the lines of:

What about CLAs?
CLAs are something to consider. Some (who?) have them, some (Sentry) have a light-weight approximation, others don't (GitButler). Decide for yourself.

Keygen has a boilerplate CLA via @cla-assistant.

[voxpelli]

CLA:s are needed if the company wants to have the freedom to change or improve the license of their code.

CLA-less at best means that a contribution uses the same license as the code it contributes to. At worst it's ambiguous and unclear.

Since Fair Source projects all have Delayed Open Source Publication (DOSP) the license of the code contributed to can also be unclear. Imagine a PR for a file that hasn't been changed since it became Open Source – should one then infer the PR to be under the OSS-license or under the Fair Source license?

This is an even bigger challenge if the DOSP license is a copyleft one (as it can be with BuSL), as then contributions to the open source version can't be upstreamed without the contributor providing it under a non-copyleft license. So it's extra pertinent then to ensure that any contributions are not made under the copyleft license.

The OpenJSF requires either CLA or DCO, that's generally a good principle here as well I think.

Though the normal Developer's Certificate of Origin doesn't work, as it specifically mentions open source licenses and fair source licenses are not open source licenses, so a Developer's Certificate of Fair Origin or something would be needed, a DCFO