A contributor license agreement (CLA), sometimes called participation agreement, is a document that defines the terms under which intellectual property has been contributed to a project or organization.
CLAs are typically used on FOSS projects.
Reasons to use a CLA
Some different reasons to use a CLA in a project:
- Protect from legal rights of the project for both users and collaborators
- Ensure quality from contributors, like for example requiring the originality of source code within the agreement.
- Clarifies the authorship; it may also be used to keep the ownership of the source code
- Increases transparency towards collaborators
CLA Templates for FOSS Projects
CLA Templates featured on this post:
- Project Harmony
Project Harmony
Project Harmony is an initiative by Canonical Ltd. about contributor agreements for Open Source software. The aim of the Harmony project is to develop templates of Contributor License Agreements for use by Free and open source software (FOSS) projects.
Examples of FOSS Projects using CLA
Some known open projects has their own CLAs, like Linux Foundation and Apache Software Foundation CLA or Linux Developer’s Certificate of Origin.
Some companies have used the CLAs to get the right of the code, as for example MongoDB’s contributor agreement or Elasticsearch. Elasticsearch switched the project license from FOSS to source-viewable in 2021, including source code that had been written by hundreds of collaborators that were collaborating in a FOSS project.