The Right to a Contribution: An Exploratory Survey on How Organizations Address It

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Citation: Germán Poo-Caamaño, Daniel M German (2015) The Right to a Contribution: An Exploratory Survey on How Organizations Address It. Open Source Systems: Adoption and Impact: 11th IFIP WG 2.13 International Conference, OSS 2015, Florence, Italy, May 16-17, 2015, Proceedings (RSS)
DOI (original publisher): 10.1007/978-3-319-17837-0_15
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.1007/978-3-319-17837-0_15
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.1007/978-3-319-17837-0_15
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): The Right to a Contribution: An Exploratory Survey on How Organizations Address It
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Summary

"exploratory literature survey on Copyright Assignments and Contribution License Agreements in FOSS projects. The available literature is scattered, no comprehensive body of research has been forthcoming to help practitioners and researchers cope with the different perspectives on the topic of these type of agreements"

Selected literature based on search for ‘copyright assignment’ and ‘contribution license agreement’ in combination with ‘free software’ and ‘open source software’. Included literature that addresses contributor agreements as a main or secondary topic, is an agreement form or paper, essay, or book, and in English. Agreements were classified by their clauses and whether they required copyright assignment or not.

Address 3 research questions.

"How Is the Term “Copyright Assignment” Defined?"

"What Research Topics Are Addressed in the Copyright Assignments Literature?"

  • Governance
  • Community Building
  • Litigation
  • Business Model
  • Proliferation of Agreements
  • Other

"What Projects and Organizations Require Copyright Assignment?"

FIXME add micro summary of summaries



Contributor agreements found are at https://github.com/blindr/contributor-assignments

Theoretical and Practical Relevance

"Future work should aim at investigating projects that have stopped requiring the copyright assignment for contributions, in particular, the reasons behind such decision. Also important is to study the rationale of projects that were forked because of the requirement of a copyright assignment. Another aspect that requires further study is whether some individuals might decide not to contribute due to such agreements, and, similarly, what is the impact of such agreements in the dynamics between contributors and the steward of a project."

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