What is all this about an additional license grant to the Initial Developer? Why would I want to contribute to an open source project under a license with this term in?
Clause 3.3 of the license gives an additional license grant to the Initial Developer to use any modifications a contributor distributes in future versions of the licensed software, whether distributed under this license or any other license. This allows an Initial Developer to use your contributors in their ‘closed-source’ product as well. Similar terms exist within the QPL at 3(b), and within the Sun Community Source License at 2.2(b), 3(b). We acknowledge that some potential contributors might be put off – they may see this as the Initial Developer being allowed to ‘unfairly’ exploit their contribution. There are three counter-arguments here: firstly, in the circumstances in which we envisage the OVPL/OVLPL being used, the Initial Developer would probably not have released the code under an open source license at all, unless they had the ‘quid-pro-quo’ of being able to benefit from modifications in their closed source variants; secondly, the Initial Developer can only benefit from th
Related Questions
- What is all this about an additional license grant to the Initial Developer? Why would I want to contribute to an open source project under a license with this term in?
- I can see the additional license grant has benefits for the Initial Developer. Does it have any benefits to the rest of the Open Source community?
- Why does The Open Group define the term "Open Source" in the license when the definition exists at http://www.opensource.org ?
