On 20/01/15 19:48, Engel Nyst wrote:
Please do, though. It's worse to practically state that using an OSI approved license(s) doesn't seem to give the permissions necessary, within the bounds of the license, for anyone to combine one's project from different sources and distribute it.
One of the uses of CLA's is to allow the software to be re-licensed under a different open source licence. This can prove highly desirable, but almost impossible, if there are large numbers of contributions under the old licence. It might be needed because it has become important to integrate the work with work under and otherwise incompatible open source licence. In the past, I think it has been necessary to remove contributions from a minor contributor, to achieve this, because they were unable or unwilling to licence it under the new licence. (Something similar happened with OpenStreetmap's map database; some geographical features had to be removed because the project was unable to get permission to use it under a new, less restrictive, licence.)
Another common reason is that the open source project is being sponsored by a commercial organisation, which wants rights use the software in a proprietary way as well. They will not redistribute contributions which are not compatible with this. That is the case with Asterisk.
In both cases, a third party can integrate their work without using a CLA, but they will have created a competing forked version, so their work is likely to much less well used than the official version.
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