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Am I correct in thinking that, if I am the original and sole author (and the code was not produced as a work for hire) of code contributed to an open-source project with a given license, I retain the rights to use that code however I please (including in violation of that license) and contribute it to projects with other, perhaps incompatible licenses (which presumably would result in the code being multi-licensed)?

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    Related FAQ item - it's written for GPL but the idea applies to any license as well: gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DeveloperViolate
    – Brandin
    Commented Jul 13, 2023 at 7:03
  • Multi-licensing (or "dual licensing") as a term usually refers to a given particular program or library being available under different licenses. What you seem to be talking about is a piece of code (perhaps a class, a library, or a suite of functions, etc.) being used in multiple different projects, each project which may have a different (perhaps incompatible) license.
    – Brandin
    Commented Jul 13, 2023 at 7:07
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    Does this answer your question? So the GPL doesn't restrict the creator of the software in any way?
    – Philip Kendall
    Commented Jul 13, 2023 at 7:53

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If you are the sole rightsholder in the code you are contributing, and you do not also complete a Copyright Licensing Agreement (CLA) or a Copyright Transfer Agreement (CTA), then the position is as described in this answer: you retain the rights to your contribution, and may still do with it as you wish. There are potential complexities if you later try to do something that is sufficiently similar to the project to which you contributed, and that contribution was made under a copyleft licence, because you presumably will have studied that larger project carefully in order to made your contribution. Thus, any future reimplementation you do might reasonably be suspected to be a derivative work of that larger project, and (if it were) thus also subject to those copyleft rules. This may affect the choice of licence for that future project.

If, however, you've made your contribution and completed a CTA, then you are no longer the rightsholder, and have no more rights to your contribution than any other member of the public.

If you've made your contribution under a CLA, the position will depend on what, exactly, the CLA commits you to with respect to reuse of the code. Were this the case, we could not comment further without seeing the CLA in question.

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    "... because you presumably will have studied that larger project carefully ..." - Studying is not the problem. I feel this word is kind of misleaing and contributing to misconceptions about how derivative works are actually created. For example, Linus Torvalds is known to have studied Minix extensively before writing Linux. And before that, Tanenbaum studied closed-source Unix implementations (actually they were "source available" for academic use only) before creating Minix, but that doesn't automatically imply that his Minix implementation was derivative of those Unix implementations.
    – Brandin
    Commented Jul 14, 2023 at 8:12
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    My suggestion is not that studying makes a finding of copyright violation more likely but that provably not studying makes it less likely: hence, the clean-room reimplementation. Studying the source code removes a principal defence against an accusation of violation, and if you've contributed to a larger project, it's very easy to show that you must have studied it. Thus, I couch my observation in the language of probabilities, rather than definitive statements. I agree that Torvalds' study of Minix doesn't automatically make his implementation a derivative, but I never said it did.
    – MadHatter ♦
    Commented Jul 14, 2023 at 8:24
  • I believe "access" is the technically correct word for this. In your scenario, if you yourself contribute to project A under a copyleft license, and then you later write project B (which is substantially similiar to A), then it'd be impossible to claim that you had no access to project A, which would indeed make project B suspected of being a derivative. If you had not contributed to project A, then at least in principle, you'd still have the option of proving (to a court) that you no access to it at the time that you wrote B. ce9.uscourts.gov/jury-instructions/node/274
    – Brandin
    Commented Jul 25, 2023 at 13:09

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