Understanding Governance Structures

In addition to the legal questions addressed under the legal section, we would like to get a better understanding of real-life questions and concerns from all parties involved and decided to conduct a series of interviews on the general question of best practice concerning governance structures within free and open source software projects. We realize that an almost perfectly drafted legal agreement may be useless if it doesn’t reflect the most important issues and concerns in the free and open source ecosystem, and especially in collaborative projects. In order to identify key questions and important matters for free and open source projects, we have decided to reach out and conduct a series of qualitative interviews. The results and analysis can be found in our Qualitative Study on the Adoption of Copyright Assignment Agreements (CAA) and Copyright License Agreements (CLA) within Selected FOSS Projects.

Examples of Contributor Agreements

With the ever-growing impact of open content and free and open source software, contributor agreements are increasingly being adopted across various projects and industries. An overview of the most popular contributor agreements can be found here:

Apache: http://apache.org/licenses/icla.pdf
Ariba: http://aribaweb.org/AribaWeb_Contributor_Agreement.pdf
Debian Social Contract: http://www.debian.org/social_contract
Django: https://www.djangoproject.com/foundation/cla/
Fedora: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Fedora_Project_Contributor_Agreement
FSF Assignment (GNU): https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2014/spring/copyright-assignment-at-the-fsf 
Google: http://code.google.com/legal/individual-cla-v1.0.html
Joomla!: http://developer.joomla.org/contributor-agreements.html
Linux Developer Certificate of Origin: http://elinux.org/Developer_Certificate_Of_Origin
Mozilla: http://www.mozilla.org/hacking/committer/committers-agreement.pdf
Nokia (QT): http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/QtContributionLicenseAgreement-1-1.pdf
Novell: ftp://sdk.provo.novell.com/ndk/evolution/docs/copyright_form.pdf
OpenWebFoundation: http://www.openwebfoundation.org/legal/the-owf-1-0-agreements/owf-contributor-license-agreement-1-0—copyright-and-patent
Oracle: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oca-405177.pdf
Perl: http://www.perlfoundation.org/contributor_license_agreement
Twitter: https://developer.twitter.com/en/developer-terms/agreement-and-policy
SugarCRM: (Sugar CRM Community Edition discontinued)
RedHat: http://pki.fedoraproject.org/images/2/2b/GenericCLA.pdf
Zimbra: https://files.zimbra.com/website/docs/Zimbra-Individual-Contributor-License-Agreement.pdf