Corporate Contributor's License Agreement

On 25/05/2011 02:08, Joshua Hartman wrote:
> Hopefully this is a decent place for this.
>
> I'd like to contribute some code back to Scala which are performance
> improvements to the library we intend to use here at LinkedIn. The
> contributor's license agreement mentions a corporate CLA as a
> possibility, and our legal team would like to move forward with a
> corporate CLA.
>
> I can't find the corporate CLA. Has anyone signed one of these in the
> past? Is it just the individual CLA with LinkedIn as the entity? Any
> help on what EPFL requires or has done before in similar situations
> would be appreciated.

Joshua,

We never negotiated a corporate CLA so far, since generally
contributions originate from a small number of individuals within a company.

In those cases generally the individual contributors submit the existing
CLA to their legal team for approval, and will then submit code to us as
individuals. The fact that certain contributions are authorized by the
company is subject to a separate approval process within the company
itself, of course.

My understanding is that a corporate CLA would just represent an
explicit acknowledgment that certain contributions made by the company
employees are in fact authorized. Since the standard CLA already
requires the employee to represent that the submitted contributions have
been authorized by their employers, a separate corporate CLA may be
somewhat redundant. As long as the contributing employee has a (written
presumably) authorization from their employers concerning certain
contributions, the standard Scala CLA should be sufficient.

That said, in case the legal team of a company should requires some
modifications, those can be agreed as needed, of course. At this time,
for example, the lawyers at Google are inspecting a slightly modified
version of the standard Scala CLA, as described above.

The opinions above are my own, and I am not a lawyer. However, no-one
else here at EPFL is a lawyer either :) We mainly require people to sign
the CLA in order make sure the committed code does not come with strings
attached, and to avoid legal problems as much as possible.

As long as the number of contributors is limited, therefore, the
standard CLA would do fine for us. Special company-wide agreements are
also possible, but we would have to work on a legal level in order to
make sure all is in order, and we are not particularly well equipped in
terms of legal expertise here at the moment. But we'll do what we can.

Best regards,
Antonio Cunei
Scala Team, EPFL

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 1:57 PM, Antonio Cunei wrote:
> My understanding is that a corporate CLA would just represent an explicit
> acknowledgment that certain contributions made by the company employees are
> in fact authorized.

The main advantage is that it lowers the contribution barrier for all
employees of that company. This is a pretty big advantage given how
many developers shy away from anything that involves lawyers.

Best,
Ismael

In Apache projects only the committers sign a CLA when they join a project.All users which want to help just check a checkbox when attaching a patch in Jira tickets.This makes it a lot easier for contributors.

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 4:05 PM, Ismael Juma <ismael@juma.me.uk> wrote:

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 1:57 PM, Antonio Cunei <antonio.cunei@epfl.ch> wrote:
> My understanding is that a corporate CLA would just represent an explicit
> acknowledgment that certain contributions made by the company employees are
> in fact authorized.

The main advantage is that it lowers the contribution barrier for all
employees of that company. This is a pretty big advantage given how
many developers shy away from anything that involves lawyers.

Best,
Ismael