I noticed a recent uptick in activity on Twitter about open source Contributor License Agreements (CLAs), mostly negative.

The above comment is from a friend of mine who has been involved in open source longer than I have, and whose opinions I respect. On this issue, however, I have to disagree.

This is definitely not the first time CLAs have been in the news. The first time I remember even hearing about them concerned MySQL. The MySQL CLA required a contributor to sign over ownership of any contribution to the project, which many thought was fine when they were independent, but started to raise some concerns when they were acquired by Sun and then Oracle. I think this latest resurgence is the result of Elastic deciding to change their license from an open source one to something more “open source adjacent”. This has caused a number of people take exception to this (note: link contains strong language).

As someone who doesn’t write much code, I think deciding to sign a CLA is up to the individual and may change from project to project. What I wanted to share is a story of why we at OpenNMS have a CLA and how we decided on one to adopt, in the hopes of explaining why a CLA can be a positive thing. I don’t think it will help with the frustrations some feel when a project changes the license out from under them, but I’m hoping it will shed some light on our reasons and thought processes.

OpenNMS was started in 1999 and I didn’t get involved until 2001 when I started work at Oculan, the commercial company behind the project. Oculan built a monitoring appliance based on OpenNMS, so while OpenNMS was offered under the GPLv2, the rest of their product had a proprietary license. They were able to do this because they owned 100% of the copyright to OpenNMS. In 2002 Oculan decided to no longer work on the project, and I was able to become the maintainer. Note that this didn’t mean that I “owned” the OpenNMS copyright. Oculan still owned the copyright but due to the terms of the license I (as well as anyone else) was free to make derivative works as long as those works adhered to the license. While the project owned the copyright to all the changes made since I took it over, there was no one copyright holder for the project as a whole.

This is fine, right? It’s open source and so everything is awesome.

Fast forward several years and we became aware of a company, funded by VCs out of Silicon Valley, that was using OpenNMS in violation of the license as a base on which to build a proprietary software application.

I can’t really express how powerless we felt about this. At the time there were, I think, five people working full time on OpenNMS. The other company had millions in VC money while we were adhering to our business model of “spend less than you earn”. We had almost no money for lawyers, and without the involvement of lawyers this wasn’t going to get resolved. One thing you learn is that while those of us in the open source world care a lot about licenses, the world at large does not. And since OpenNMS was backed by a for-profit company, there was no one to help us but ourselves (there are some limited options for license enforcement available to non-profit organizations).

We did decide to retain the services of a law firm, who immediately warned us how much “discovery” could cost. Discovery is the process of obtaining evidence in a possible lawsuit. This is one way a larger firm can fend off the legal challenges of a smaller firm – simply outspend them. It made use pretty anxious.

Once our law firm contacted the other company, the reply was that if they were using OpenNMS code, they were only using the Oculan code and thus we had no standing to bring a copyright lawsuit against them.

Now we knew this wasn’t true, because the main reason we knew this company was using OpenNMS was that a disgruntled previous employee told us about it. They alleged that this company had told their engineers to follow OpenNMS commits and integrate our changes into their product. But since much of the code was still part of the original Oculan code base, it made our job much more difficult.

One option we had was to get with Oculan and jointly pursue a remedy against this company. The problem was that Oculan went out of business in 2004, and it took us awhile to find out that the intellectual property had ended up Raritan. We were able to work with Raritan once we found this out, but by this time the other company also went out of business, pretty much ending the matter.

As part of our deal with Raritan, OpenNMS was able to purchase the copyright to the OpenNMS code once owned by Oculan, granting Raritan an unlimited license to continue to use the parts of the code they had in their products. It wasn’t cheap and involved both myself and my business partner using the equity in our homes to guarantee a loan to cover the purchase, but for the first time in years most of the OpenNMS copyright was held by one organization.

This process made us think long and hard about managing copyright moving forward. While we didn’t have thousands of contributors like some projects, the number of contributors we did have was non-trivial, and we had no CLA in place. The main question was: if we were going to adopt a CLA, what should it look like? I didn’t like the idea of asking for complete ownership of contributions, as OpenNMS is a platform and while someone might want to contribute, say, a monitor to OpenNMS, they shouldn’t be prevented from contributing a similar monitor to Icinga or Zabbix.

So we asked our our community, and a person named DJ Gregor suggested we adopt the Sun (now Oracle) Contributor Agreement. This agreement introduced the idea of “dual copyright”. Basically, the contributor keeps ownership of their work but grants copyright to the project as well. This was a pretty new idea at the time but seems to be common now. If you look at CLAs for, say, Microsoft and even Elastic, you’ll see similar language, although it is more likely worded as a “copyright grant” or something other than “dual copyright”.

This idea was favorable to our community, so we adopted it as the “OpenNMS Contributor Agreement” (OCA). Now the hard work began. While most of our active contributors were able to sign the OCA, what about the inactive ones? With a project as old as OpenNMS there are a number of people who had been involved in the project but due to either other interests or changing priorities they were no longer active. I remember going through all the contributions in our code base and systematically hunting down every contributor, no matter how small, and asking them to sign the OCA. They all did, which was nice, but it wasn’t an easy task. I can remember the e-mail of one contributor bounced and I finally hunted them down in Ireland via LinkedIn.

Now a lot of the focus of CLAs is around code ownership, but there is a second, often more important part. Most CLAs ask the contributor to affirm that they actually own the changes they are contributing. This may seem trivial, but I think it is important. Sure, a contributor can lie and if it turns out they contributed something they really didn’t own the project is still responsible for dealing with that code, but there are a number of studies that have shown that simply reminding someone about a moral obligation goes a long way to reinforce ethical behavior. When someone decides to sign a CLA with such a clause it will at least make them think about it and reaffirm that their work is their own. If a project doesn’t want to ask for a copyright assignment or grant, they should at least ask for something like this.

While the initial process was pretty manual, currently managing the OCAs is pretty automated. When someone makes a pull request on our Github project, it will check to see if they have signed the OCA and if not, send them to the agreement.

The fact that the copyright was under one organization came in handy when we changed the license. One of my favorite business models for open source software is paid hosting, and I often refer to WordPress as an example. WordPress is dead simple to install, but it does require that you have your own server, understand setting up a database, etc. If you don’t want to do that, you can pay WordPress a fee and they’ll host the product for you. It’s a way to stay pure open source yet generate revenue.

But what happens if you work on an open source project and a much bigger, much better funded company just takes your project and hosts it? I believe one of the issues facing Elastic was that Amazon was monetizing their work and they didn’t like it. Open source software is governed mainly by copyright law and if you don’t distribute a “copy” then copyright doesn’t apply. Many lawyers would claim that if I give you access to open source software via a website or an API then I’m not giving you a copy.

We dealt with this at OpenNMS, and as usual we asked our community for advice. Once again I think it was DJ who suggested we change our license to the Affero GPL (AGPLv3) which specifically extends the requirement to offer access to the code even if you only offer it as a hosted service. We were able to make this change easily because the copyright was held by one entity. Can you imagine if we had to track down every contributor over 15+ years? What if a contributor dies? Does a project have to deal with their estate or do they have to remove the contribution? It’s not easy. If there is no copyright assignment, a CLA should at least include detailed contact information in case the contributor needs to be reached in the future.

Finally, remember that open source is open source. Don’t like the AGPLv3? Well you are free to fork the last OpenNMS GPLv2 release and improve it from there. Don’t like what Elastic did with their license? Feel free to fork it.

You might have detected a theme here. We relied heavily on our community in making these decisions. The OpenNMS Group, as stewards of the OpenNMS Project, takes seriously the responsibilities to preserve the open source nature of OpenNMS, and I like to think that has earned us some trust. Having a CLA in place addresses some real business needs, and while I can understand people feeling betrayed at the actions of some companies, ultimately the choice is yours as to whether or not the benefits of being involved in a particular project outweigh the requirement to sign a contributor agreement.