Contributor License Agreement

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Contributor License Agreement (CLA) defines the terms under which intellectual property has been contributed to a company/project, typically open source. They are generally used for two reasons, to serve the project best or to make it possible to relicense the project without asking every contributor.

Quote from Apache Software Foundation licensing page:

The purpose of this agreement is to clearly define the terms under which intellectual property has been contributed to the ASF and thereby allow us to defend the project should there be a legal dispute regarding the software at some future time.

Quote from MySQL Contributing FAQ:

MySQL is the owner and copyright holder of the entire MySQL product, whereas Linux does not have one single entity as a copyright holder. This makes the MySQL Dual Licensing model possible. The MySQL users benefit from this in the form of further product development financed by MySQL (with currently over 80 developers on MySQL’s payroll). While MySQL has developed most of the MySQL database itself, and continues to do so, MySQL also wants to simplify the processes for contributors to MySQL.

Companies/projects that uses CLAs:

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