[guardian-dev] jitsi's parent company BlueJimp becoming part of Atlassian

Hans-Christoph Steiner hans at guardianproject.info
Sun Apr 26 12:19:47 EDT 2015



Tom Ritter:
> On 22 April 2015 at 08:41, Hans-Christoph Steiner
> <hans at guardianproject.info> wrote:
>>
>> This is sounding not so promising for the future of jitsi as free software.
>> Atlassian seems to have no free software projects of their own whatsoever, and
>> there page about "open source" is basically a sales pitch:
>>
>> https://www.atlassian.com/opensource
>>
>> more here, it looks like this is probably the Atlassian press release, more or
>> less:
>> http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/21/atlassian-acquires-open-source-video-conferencing-company-bluejimp-to-power-hipchats-video-chat/
>>
> 
> If they're going to use Jitsi's (open) source code in their closed
> source environment, and build on it without releasing the
> contributions (which is possible as they can relicense any additional
> developments to it) - it makes me wonder if past contributors to Jitsi
> can assert copyright over their contributions.  (I assume Jitsi wasn't
> requiring contributor agreements like some projects do to clear
> similar hurdles.)  I don't know much about this part of open source
> licensing though.
> 
> -tom

BlueJimp has required a CLA for contributions to their jitsi repositories:
http://bluejimp.com/bca.pdf

With this clause:

"you hereby assign to us joint ownership, and to the extent that such
assignment is or becomes invalid, ineffective or unenforceable, you hereby
grant to us a perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide, no-charge,
royalty-free, unrestricted license to exercise all rights under those
copyrights. This includes, at our option, the right to sublicense these same
rights to third parties through multiple levels of sublicensees or other
licensing arrangements; "

Which seems to me to say that they can relicense any of the jitsi source code
as they please.  That's part of my objection to having otr4j governed by their
CLA:

https://github.com/jitsi/otr4j/issues/15

.hc


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