The Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) is a copyright assignment that allows Free Software projects to bundle their copyright in a single organisation or person. This enables projects to ensure their legal maintainability, including important issues such as preserving the ability to relicense and certainty to have sufficient rights to enforce licences in court. The assigning party does not lose their ability to use their code either, as the FLA ensures a re-transferral of unlimited usage/single exploitation rights back to the author.
The FLA is used for FSFE's Fiduciary Program. FSFE's Freedom Task Force uses its large team of technical
and legal experts to handle the legal issues and take care of licence compliance, allowing projects to focus on project management and technical work. Examples of projects benefiting from this service are Bacula.org and OpenSwarm.
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The FLA can also be adapted to assign the rights to another organisation set up by the project team itself. This
organisation would then have to take care of the paperwork and licence compliance work itself, but it would still benefit from the solidity of the FLA for the gathering of rights and FSFE's Freedom Task Force will be glad to provide insight and experience to such organisations.
Download a customisable copy of the FLA (LaTex format, GFDL licenced)
Download a customisable copy of the FLA (LaTex format, CC by-sa licenced)
Whichever projects decide, Free Software Foundation Europe's Freedom Task Force will be happy to help. You can send us a message through our online contact form.
The FLA was written by Dr. Axel Metzger (ifross) and Georg Greve (FSFE) in consultation with renowned international legal and technical experts. Parties ivolved in the evolution of the FLA at some point or another included RA Dr. Till Jaeger, Carsten Schulz, Prof. Eben Moglen, RA Thorsten Feldmann, LL.M., Werner Koch, Alessandro Rubini, Reinhard Muller and others. The latest revision was compiled by Georg Greve and FSFE's FTF coordinator Shane M Coughlan based on feedback provided by Dr. Lucie Guibault of the Institute for Information Law in the Netherlands.
General feedback, comments and also questions about the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) can be sent to ftf@fsfeurope.org or by contacting FSFE's Freedom Task Force.
With growing popularity, Free Software also faces more and more legal issues. Unlike proprietary projects, which tend to be owned by a single company and thrown away after a few years, Free Software often has many authors and is used for many years, some of the Free Software programs in wide use are 10-20 years old or even older than that.
Making sure these programs will be legally safe to use and defendable even after their authors are possibly nowhere to be found or have even left planet earth is one of the issues the Free Software community is facing.
Recently, we have also seen an increase in cases where authors of Free Software were attacked solely on legal grounds to get him or her to change the name of a software package or to stop distributing it entirely. We as a community must find ways to defend our active contributors against this.
Another issue is that more and more companies are running Free Software projects and ask developers to give up their rights so these companies can sell proprietary versions of that piece of Free Software.
As management, company policy and markets are often subject to drastic and rapid change, no company could ever guarantee to stick to a certain policy for 20 years or more. Additionally, no company is entirely safe from bankruptcy or buy-outs by other companies.
Also for this reason companies often don't trust each other to "do the right thing" for a long time into the future.
The Fiduciary Licence Agreement will help with all these issues by allowing the FSFE or another trusted party to take care of the legal maintainability and protection of Free Software projects.