Project Harmony: Inbound transfer of rights in FOSS Projects

Autores

  • Amanda Brock

Resumo

Software engineers participating in open source software projects are frequently  asked to sign "Copyright Contribution Agreements ("CCAs)" with respect to the contributions they make to those projects. 
As lawyers we are happy to read and understand copyright agreements and licences. As lawyers few of us can code.  Software engineers (at least in Canonical) seem to understand more law than might be expected, but their expertise is software, not law. The proliferation of forms and wording in the CCAs, mean that they are routinely asked to sign up to a diverse selection of CCAs differing meanings and intentions. Valuable coding time is wasted as they wade through legal wording.This is not only an issue both from a productivity and efficiency perspective, but is also problematic in ensuring that developers understand what rights they grant in their work..Project Harmony came into being in the Summer of 2010. Its birth followed a long incubation and much discussion within Canonical and with parties such as SFLC and lawyers specialising in FOSS.  It is intended in the first instance to tackle CCA Proliferation.

Biografia do Autor

  • Amanda Brock
    Amanda Brock is General Counsel of Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu project. Having graduated with Honours from Glasgow University, Amanda went on to obtain a Masters in Comparative Jurisprudence from New York University Law School and a LLM in IT and IP law from Queen Mary and Westfield, University of London. She has spent the last 10 years working in house in a variety of industries, was the first lawyer employed to work on the Freeserve ISP and was an editor of the Butterworth's publication Electronic Business Law. She is author of E:Business; The Practical Guide to the Laws and has written extensively on commercial and IT law.
IFOSSLR Vol 2, Issue 2 cover

Downloads

Publicado

2011-02-02

Edição

v. 2 n. 2 (2010)

Seção

Articles

Licença

The most restrictive licence we will accept for submission is Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 international (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) SPDX identifier CC-BY-4.0

Como Citar

Project Harmony: Inbound transfer of rights in FOSS Projects. (2011). Journal of Open Law, Technology & Society, 2(2), 139-150. https://www.jolts.world/index.php/jolts/article/view/49