[Interest] Contributor agreement rundown

[John Layt]

On Wednesday 18 Apr 2012 03:55:19 Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
> I went to register for a Gerrit account.  There I saw that I must agree
> to a "contributor agreement".  It's very legalese, so I'm not sure if it
> means what I think it means: Nokia can transform open source code I
> contribute into non-open code?
> 
...
> 
> The beef is the phrase "under license terms of Nokia’s choosing", which
> can be an open license, but is not required to.
> 
> Did I understand that correctly?

Yes, you can find more details at [1].  The licence you grant Nokia is 
required for two reasons:

1) For Qt Commercial to continue supporting the commercial users with the same 
unified code base and preventing a fork.

2) For the Free Qt Foundation to allow all of Qt to be released under the BSD 
if Nokia stops releasing Qt under a free licence.  See [2] for details.

It is a trade-off, but not entirely one-way.  They get to sell your code, but 
the money raised goes towards supporting Qt.

It's for each individual to decide if it is acceptable or not.  I'm happy with 
it, others are not.  The Free Qt Foundation had it legally reviewed and 
supports it.

>From a practical viewpoint, the only place Nokia is likely to use your code is 
in Qt, it seems highly unlikely that they would use it anywhere else.

Note that you still retain your copyright, unlike under the old agreement.

Cheers!

John.

[1] http://qt-project.org/legal.html
[2] http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php