Contributor License Agreements
An introduction to intellectual property concepts as they relate to FOSS wouldn’t be complete without introducing Contributor License Agreements (CLA) and the Developer Certificate of Origin_ (DCO). You’ll learn more about these in Chapter 17, Master Contribution Fundamentals, and Chapter 20, Releasing FOSS Projects, so we’ll only lay the groundwork here to give you a solid footing later on.
With a name like “contributor license agreement” you will, I’m sure, be shocked to learn that a CLA is a legal document. Signed by a contributor prior to submitting work to a FOSS project, a CLA is an IP safety net for the FOSS project. Remember, FOSS projects are like coral: the combined copyrighted work of multiple individuals ...
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