CLA is broken (was: Re: packages without internet source in fedora)

[Callum Lerwick]

On Mon, 2008-04-21 at 12:00 -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> 2. Contributor Grant of License. You hereby grant to Red Hat, Inc., on
> behalf of the Project, and to recipients of software distributed by the
> Project: 
> 
>       * (a) a perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide, fully paid-up,
>         royalty free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce,
>         prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform,
>         sublicense, and distribute your Contribution and such derivative
>         works; and, 
> 
> See, I think the bit you're missing is that the contributor is not
> granting COPYRIGHT, they are granting a copyright LICENSE to red hat.
> It doesn't say red hat can relicense - only sublicense.
> 
> Seriously, where did you get the idea otherwise?

I think the issue might be the definition of "sublicense". People may be
taking that to mean Red Hat can sublicense under whatever license it
wants. Which is exactly what my first thought was.

A plain-english explanation of the legal definition of "sublicense" in
the context of copyright licensing would probably be helpful. The best I
can google up is:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sublicense

"A license granted by a licensee to a a third party, under the authority
of the license originally granted by a licensor to the licensee"

Which leaves me wondering what exactly "under the authority of the
license originally granted by a licensor" means. Does that mean Red Hat
can only sublicense if the license says they can? The GPLv3 explicitly
disallows sublicensing, "section 10 makes it unnecessary". BSD does not
mention sublicensing at all, and X11 license explicitly grants
sublicensing.

So we have all three possible situations. How does the CLA interact in
each case? Am I thinking about this too hard? At any rate IANAL.
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