Handling contributions in an opensource project

Question

There is an opensource project that I started some years ago and I still maintain it. This project is licensed under the BSD (3 clause) license and at the moment I am the sole copyright holder and contributor of the project.

Every source file contains this copyright info:

// Copyright (C) 2009-2016, <my name>.
// All rights reserved.
// Code licensed under the BSD License.
// http://www.<projects_website>.org/LICENSE

Here is a link to the BSD license.

Recently someone expressed his interest in contributing and I would like to know what is the best way to handle contributions so that everyone is happy. Copyright transfer agreement? Adding new copyright co-owners in files. Something else? What kind of changes I'll need to make to the license and the source files' copyright notice?

Answer 1

Ask the contributor to add their contribution under the same license. Nothing is lost (you still can take it as a basis for closed source).

I'd make sure to add a CONTRIBUTING file somewhere in your version (and show it prominently) stating that only contributions under the above license will be accepted, and that contributor affirms to have the right to contribute under those conditions.

Answer 2

There are many ways to handle such things.

Copyright transfer is not well seen by external developers, and with a BSD license I think it is also not worth the effort: it is anyway difficult to lock further the derivation of work.

So if the contributor will do substantial work in a file, I would add his copyright line in that file. Some project prefer to have an AUTHORS file to put the name and copyright holder of all the modifications. Try not to mix different licenses in the same file.

IMHO it is important to use a control version system, so to track the contribution of the different authors. There is no need that all (or any) contributors will use it, but you should track it. In this way you will have much less work in case of splitting the project (e.g. creating a library), changing licenses, etc. [e.g. git can track who contribute every line of code].