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How do I make contributors to my project transfer copyright to me? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by dullbananas@lemmy.ca to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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Is there a pull request template that does this?

Edit: I was worried about possibly needing to change license. For now I will just use a permissive license. The situation is made seemingly complicated by the possible need to use copylefted images, combined with the possible need for using server code (which shouldn't use creative commons) in addition to the static html. I would rather deal with including parts with different licenses (probably not as complicated as I initially thought) instead of contributor license agreements.

Edit 2: Also, license enforcement is not very important for my project.

Edit 3: Now I'm using creative commons zero and making the repo comply with https://reuse.software/

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[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 1 points 8 months ago

It depends on what license the project is using. Some licenses are very permissive, meaning there's lots of ways they can be abused. For example with MIT/BSD licenses there's no provision to share the code with the final product so they could drag their feet releasing parts of the code or hide them altogether. They could also resort to tivoization, NDAs, commercial plugins and all kinds of shenanigans.

Look for example to the Plex and Emby projects which were originally open and went commercial later. The way they did it is why there's a lot of bad blood in the community to this day.

I've also personally been involved with other projects where someone tried to take them commercial in a less than graceful way, shall we say. It's never pretty.