The FLA Gets Some Traction

by Mike Gunderloy - Aug. 25, 2008Comments (3)

Have you ever heard of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement - the FLA? No, it's not an alterative to other free and open source license agreements that you're probably already familiar with, like the GPL, Mozilla License, and BSD License. Rather, it's an adjunct to any copyleft license, designed to help ensure the long-term survivability of free software projects. With the announcement last week that KDE has adopted an FLA, this notion may take on new prominence.

Here's the basic idea behind having an FLA. As free software projects grow, the successful ones attract participation from many developers and other contributors. By default, each individual contributor owns the copyright in their own code, but this could be a problem down the line. What happens if the project as a whole wants to change their licensing, but one of the contributors can no longer be contacted? They're stuck with either keeping the current license, or removing the contributor's work from the project.

The FLA - developed, in this case, by the Free Software Foundation Europe - is a formal assignment of copyright from individual contributors to an organization, which can then act as the legal custodian of the code. The FLA gives the assignee

the right to relicense the software as necessary for the long-term legal maintainability and protection of the software. The agreement also grants the author an unlimited amount of non-exclusive licences by FSFE, which allow using and distributing the program in other projects and under other licences.Â

ByÂ default, the FSFE is the recipient of the relicensing rights, but they have customizable versions of the FLA available for free software projects that have their own infrastructure in place to manage these rights. Projects that want to concentrate on technical issues can apply to use the FSFE's Fiduciary Services to manage their legal side.

Does your free software project need an FLA? If you're an individual developer, probably not. But once you start taking in contributions from others - especially if those others are located in more than one legal jurisdiction - it's definitely something that you should be looking into, to help guarantee the code's long-term survival as free software.