The Apache Contributor License Agreement

The Apache Contributor License Agreement

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has recently begun to require its contributors to submit a signed Contributor License Agreement. This agreement is copied in the Appendices.

The Apache Contributor License Agreement is intended to convey to ASF all necessary rights to the contributor's intellectual property so that ASF can do what it wishes with those Contributions. The agreement itself asserts that the goal of the Contributor License Agreement is to protect the Contributor:

This license is for your protection as a Contributor of software to the Foundation and does not change your right to use your own contributions for any other purpose. (Apache Contributor License Agreement, initial paragraph.)

In fact, the main purpose of the Apache Contributor License Agreement is to protect ASF in two important ways:

1. It allows ASF to license its collective and derivative works including the Contribution under any license it chooses. That gives the ASF flexibility regarding relicensing. ( Relicensing is discussed more fully in Chapter 10.) The Apache Contributor License Agreement does not constrain ASF's licensing options for collective and derivative works in any way.

2. It allows ASF to assert that each Contribution is actually owned by its Contributors , and that third party licenses and restrictions known to the Contributors have been divulged. This will make it possible for future Apache licenses to convey a warranty of provenance . (That term is described in Chapter 9; the OSL and AFL licenses contain an express warranty of provenance .)

Contributor agreements such as the Apache Contributor License Agreement are licenses , in both name and effect. They convey copyright and patent rights, as do all the other open source licenses described in this book. But these contributor agreements are not submitted to Open Source Initiative for its review and approval, and so there is no established process for verifying that those agreements are compatible with the Open Source Principles.

This book is also not the place to do that analysis. I will suggest, however, that this contributor agreement, in use by the Apache Software Foundation, is truly open source, based upon my own reading of its terms. Whether that is true for the contributor agreements demanded by other projects remains an open question. Contributors should seek their own legal advice before signing such contributor agreements.

Contributor agreements are relatively new to open source software projects, but they are not new to other industries. Musicians, journalists , photographers, and other contributors of intellectual property have often been asked to sign contracts with their publishers under which they grant broad intellectual property rights. Through the passage of time, some of those works have dramatically increased in value, and the publishers have sometimes failed to share their profits.

While that is not a likely result when the publisher is a nonprofit open source project such as the Apache Software Foundation, not all open source projects are (or will remain ) benign ; not all projects serve the public interest. Each contributor should decide for himself or herself whether to sign a contributor agreement.

Nor is a contributor agreement always necessary. If an open source contribution is submitted under a compatible open source license, no other contributor agreement is necessary. Chapter 10 discusses open source license compatibility.