Your rule is a common one, but somewhat misses the point of the argument. In the absence of a CLA who does own the copyright to the work you do?
The point of the article us that it may, or may not, be you.
I notice that you weren't clear on this part in your post, suggesting perhaps that it's not something that's front-of-mind like the CLA is.
On the CLA front I'm on the fence. Assign, don't assign, that's for each person to decide.
But the alternative to CLA is not necessarily "I keep the copyright". That's the point the article is asking you to consider.
Aside; unless you have a specific bit of paper assigning copyright to you, and assuming you have a day job, it's very unlikely that you hold the copyright even if you only do OSS work at home on weekends.
And lastly - have you ever enforced your copyright legally? If you have never enforced a copyright violation then your work is effectively public domain. Yes the threat that you could take action exists, but in practice your contributed-to-project can change their license and call your bluff.
> In the absence of a CLA who does own the copyright to the work you do
under US law, if you are not an employee of the company that owns the code you're contributing to, and you didn't sign a work-for-hire agreement with them, then you own the code you produce, full stop.
Unless you signed a work-for-hire agreement with somebody else! Yhis is where it gets tricky.
In the US (afaik / ianal) your employer gets to claim your copyright if you’ve contributed to a project on company time, or using company equipment, or something else I can’t remember. This actually sounds reasonable to me.
I am sorry but I don't understand what you're saying.
> Your rule is a common one, but somewhat misses the point of the argument. In the absence of a CLA who does own the copyright to the work you do?
If I don't own the copyright in the absence of a CLA, then I don't have the authority to sign a CLA and therefore the CLA should be void. I can't sell/gift/whatever you something I don't own.
Disclaimer: I anal. Even if I were a lawyer which I am not, I am definitely NOT your lawyer.
(Ianal, but I assume that means if you did sign a CLA and submit then you are breaking copyright.)
But that's not my point.
My point is that "not signing a CLA" is only half the job. The other part of the job is actively finding out your status with your company to understand their position. (And I recommend getting that answer in writing. )
The contributor owns the copyright. In Germany for example, there's no transfer of copyright, only non-exclusive license to use. The Developer Certificate of Origin can be used to be make it legal.
I used to think that copyright is always assigned to the creator, like in Germany, and it appears that I was wrong: according to Wikipedia, at least English law actually defaults (no contract clause needed!) to assigning your copyright to your employer if the contribution was done as part of work for hire. This was a surprise to me but it explained why some OSS projects, like ones by Adobe, require a CLA: many people use their libraries at work, and if someone like that contributes a fix Adobe’s lawyers justifiedly would not want part of their code to be owned by another company.
It is a sad side-effect that assigning away your rights with a CLA to some company also enables some shady behavior[0], but it seems that the possible intent to “to place a rug under the project, so that they can pull at the first sign of a bad quarter” co-exists with a more reasonable desire not to have parts of the codebase that you started and mostly maintain at your own cost owned by a potentially hostile entity.
That said, it’s sad that DCOs are not used instead[1]. IIUC, DCO basically makes it clear that the contributor is the one owning the copyright, eliminating the above issue without enabling the rug-pulling.
> I used to think that copyright is always assigned to the creator, like in Germany, and it appears that I was wrong: according to Wikipedia, at least English law actually defaults (no contract clause needed!) to assigning your copyright to your employer if the contribution was done as part of work for hire
It‘s basically the same in Germany. Urheberrecht is not the same as copyright, but comprises personal rights and exploitation rights. 99% of questions about Urheberrecht in commercial settings are about exploitation rights, so ~ about copyright in an American sense.
Personal rights (mostly the right to be named) stay with the author and can never be transferred, exploitation rights default to the employer in employment situations (and are usually explicitly transferred in work contracts, to be safe).
Copyright is not the same as licensing. There is a big difference between granting your employer a license to your work (or OSS contribution), vs. making them the copyright holder (meaning they actually created the work, and you are entirely out of the picture for all intents and purposes). I’d like a lawyer to chime in regarding this English law.
> This was a surprise to me but it explained why some OSS projects, like ones by Adobe, require a CLA: many people use their libraries at work, and if someone like that contributes a fix Adobe’s lawyers justifiedly would not want part of their code to be owned by another company.
A CLA does not affect who owns the code. It only grants the OSS project the right to use the code.
Generally speaking, a CLA will be a non-exclusive license, meaning you can give the OSS project the right to use your code while you also retain the ability to license that code to others as well (as well as continue to use it in your own projects)
The DCO does let someone who doesn't own a piece of code to contribute it to a project, they just have to be certain that it is licensed under the license it says it is licensed under.
The point of the article us that it may, or may not, be you.
I notice that you weren't clear on this part in your post, suggesting perhaps that it's not something that's front-of-mind like the CLA is.
On the CLA front I'm on the fence. Assign, don't assign, that's for each person to decide.
But the alternative to CLA is not necessarily "I keep the copyright". That's the point the article is asking you to consider.
Aside; unless you have a specific bit of paper assigning copyright to you, and assuming you have a day job, it's very unlikely that you hold the copyright even if you only do OSS work at home on weekends.
And lastly - have you ever enforced your copyright legally? If you have never enforced a copyright violation then your work is effectively public domain. Yes the threat that you could take action exists, but in practice your contributed-to-project can change their license and call your bluff.