Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.
I've added a clarification separately, please take a look there first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23365469
> The point is that when a non-Googler contributes code, it’s non-proprietary since the non-Googler is by definition a non-Googler.
I think we are using different definitions of "proprietary". I'm using it to mean "non-open-source" [1], and you're using it to mean "employed by a specific company" (or something else); can you please clarify what you mean or rephrase what you're trying to say?
> What the CLA does not prohibit is proprietary use—- your lengthy answer. The OP makes the point that Google will find a way to use public contributions for Google’s own profit.
That's not the purpose of a CLA; that's the purpose of a project's license. That was the point of my post. Anyone can take a project with an Apache/BSD/MIT license (whether or not the project has a CLA, it's orthogonal), make a proprietary product from it, distribute it, sell it, etc. and they would be just fine doing it, without also sharing any of the source.
To put it another way, a CLA cannot restrict proprietary or commercial use of a patch or contribution, if the underlying project license is Apache/BSD/MIT, because all those licenses already allow commercial use, incorporating software into proprietary / closed-source products, etc. Such a CLA would be incompatible with the project's license.
I've never seen an Apache/BSD/MIT project where the CLA (and only the CLA) prohibits commercial / proprietary / closed-source or any other use cases — if you have an example or two, could you please point them out? I'm very curious to see how this would work in practice, because this seems like a strong contradiction, so I would be interested to see how this plays out in practice.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software
I've added a clarification separately, please take a look there first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23365469
> The point is that when a non-Googler contributes code, it’s non-proprietary since the non-Googler is by definition a non-Googler.
I think we are using different definitions of "proprietary". I'm using it to mean "non-open-source" [1], and you're using it to mean "employed by a specific company" (or something else); can you please clarify what you mean or rephrase what you're trying to say?
> What the CLA does not prohibit is proprietary use—- your lengthy answer. The OP makes the point that Google will find a way to use public contributions for Google’s own profit.
That's not the purpose of a CLA; that's the purpose of a project's license. That was the point of my post. Anyone can take a project with an Apache/BSD/MIT license (whether or not the project has a CLA, it's orthogonal), make a proprietary product from it, distribute it, sell it, etc. and they would be just fine doing it, without also sharing any of the source.
To put it another way, a CLA cannot restrict proprietary or commercial use of a patch or contribution, if the underlying project license is Apache/BSD/MIT, because all those licenses already allow commercial use, incorporating software into proprietary / closed-source products, etc. Such a CLA would be incompatible with the project's license.
I've never seen an Apache/BSD/MIT project where the CLA (and only the CLA) prohibits commercial / proprietary / closed-source or any other use cases — if you have an example or two, could you please point them out? I'm very curious to see how this would work in practice, because this seems like a strong contradiction, so I would be interested to see how this plays out in practice.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software