On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 8:21 PM, Xavier Combelle <xavier.combe...@gmail.com> wrote: > I was interested in contributing in golang, but was afraid to contribute > because of signing the CLA. After rereading it, I thought that I might be > too much worrying. > > Can someone explain in non juridical words what it means. > > I was particularly worried by the copyright license terms. > > "Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this > Agreement, You hereby grant to Google and to recipients of software > distributed by Google a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, > royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative > works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute > Your Contributions and such derivative works." > > For what I understand it goes further than BSD licensing, for example it > doesn't imply that the BSD copyright notice must stay in code source and > along with binary distribution.
I'm not sure I understand exactly what you are asking. The copyright license agreement, which you sign if you want to contribute code to the Go project, is not the same as the BSD license, which is the license used for the Go distribution. We explicitly don't want every contributor to produce their own version of the BSD license; we want all the code to be distributed under the copyright of "The Go Authors." It is true that if you sign the CLA and give the code to Google that Google could then re-release the code under a license other than the BSD license. There is no reason for Google to do that, but it would be permitted to do so. But that is not significantly different from what the BSD license permits anyhow. The BSD license, unlike, say, the GPL, permits additional restrictions to be placed on the code. The only relevant difference between the CLA and using the BSD license yourself is that Google could distribute the code while omitting the BSD license entirely. Do you find that to be troublesome? Ian -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
