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

seth vidal skvidal at fedoraproject.org
Tue Apr 22 01:55:36 UTC 2008


On Mon, 2008-04-21 at 17:10 -0500, Callum Lerwick wrote:
> 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.

It can sublicense w/i the terms of the original license. If the GPLv3
says no sublicensing then there's no sublicensing. For the case of the
GPLv3 All that means is that red hat is allowed to redistribute the
original software under the GPLv3.

EXACTLY what it says in the definition you quoted and in the CLA.

-sv







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