The Glibc developers recently announced via their mailing list that they have made some specific changes to the rules for accepting changes and transferring copyright, thereby canceling the mandatory transfer of ownership rights to the code to the Open Source Foundation.
By analogy with the changes previously adopted in the GCC project, the signing of the CLA agreement with the Free Software Foundation at Glibc has been moved to the category of optional operations performed at the request of the developer.
With the new changes made to the rule, patches will now be allowed to be accepted without transferring rights to the FOSS Foundation , with the exception of code that is shared with other GNU projects through Gnulib.
Contributors who have an FSF copyright assignment do not need to change anything. Contributors who wish to use the Origin Developer Certificate [2] must add a "Signed by" message to their confirmation.
The code shared with other GNU packages through Gnulib will continue to require FSF allocation.
In addition to transferring ownership rights to the Open Source Foundation, developers have the option to confirm their right to transfer code to the Glibc project through the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) mechanism. According to DCO, author tracking is carried out by appending a line "Signed by: developer name and email address" to each change.
By attaching this signature to the patch, the developer confirms their authorship of the transferred code and agrees to its distribution as part of the project or as part of the code under a free license. Unlike the actions of the GCC project, the decision in Glibc was not issued by the governing board from above, but rather was made after preliminary discussions with all community representatives.
Canceling the mandatory signing of an agreement with the Open Source Foundation greatly simplifies the process of bringing new participants into the development and makes the project independent of the Foundation's trends. While signing the CLA by individual participants only resulted in wasted time on unnecessary paperwork, for corporations and employees of large companies, transferring rights to the STR Foundation was associated with numerous delays and legal approvals, which were not always successfully completed.
The refusal of centralized management of code rights also consolidates the originally accepted license terms, as changing the license now requires obtaining the personal consent of each developer who has not transferred the rights to the Free Software Foundation.
However, the Glibc code remains licensed under "LGPLv2.1 or later ," which allows migration to newer versions of the LGPL without further approval. Since the rights to most of the code remain with the Free Software Foundation, this organization continues to act as guarantor of the distribution of the Glibc code only under free copyleft licenses.
For example, the Free Software Foundation may block attempts to introduce a commercial / dual license or the launch of closed proprietary products through a separate agreement with the authors of the code.
Among the shortcomings of abandoning centralized code rights management is confusion in negotiating license-related issues . Whereas previously all claims regarding violations of license terms were resolved through interaction with a single organization, now the outcome of violations, including unintentional ones, has become unpredictable and requires agreement with each individual participant.
As an example, the situation with the Linux kernel, where individual kernel developers trigger legal action, including for the purpose of personal gain.
The rule changes will take effect on August 2nd and will affect all Glibc branches available for development. Finally, if you are interested in learning more, you can consult the details at the following link.