Zimbra Contributor Agreement???

[drscott]

I have this social networking technology that I have developed over past years, including considerable time, effort, and money in securing patents. I like Zimbra (and open source) and would like to put the technology in ZCS (partially so that I can use the technology with ZCS )

But then I read the Zimbra Contributor Agreement which says "2. You assign all right, title and interest worldwide in all patents, inventions copyrights and related more rights ("IP Right") for the full term of their existence in and to Your Contributions to Zimbra and Zimbra shall be able to record this assignment." Whoa!

I would like to contribute to ZCS, but am not about to turn my patent portfolio over to Zimbra. Am I misunderstanding?

[jholder]

If you plan on submitting code and integrating it into ZCS that we then distribute to all our users, than a contrib agreement is what you need to sign.

If you're planning on writing a zimlet, or customization that we do not distribute (but you do), then you can do that without the agreement.

[drscott]

Originally Posted by jholder

If you plan on submitting code and integrating it into ZCS that we then distribute to all our users, than a contrib agreement is what you need to sign.

If you're planning on writing a zimlet, or customization that we do not distribute (but you do), then you can do that without the agreement.

So, is the issue distribution and/or integration? It sounds like distribution.

If I wrote a zimlet and Zimbra wanted to distribute it I would need to sign a contribution agreement. However, if I wrote code into the open-source version of ZCS and distributed it myself, I would not need a contribution agreement, but would be subject to the Yahoo Public License. Is that correct?

[jholder]

both.

Let's say you find a bug in our server code, and submit a patch, and we bundle. Because we now are supporting it (for NE and FOSS), we should have the rights to modify or change to fit our needs.

Zimlets/hacks are a different story. You can do what ever you want, under what ever license you want. We just don't distribute/support them.