Hello! I’m a big fan of SonarQube and have a clarifying question about copyright and licensing.
The context is that I have been working on a project which allows for Sonar’s open source analyzers to be run as a CLI, licensed this under the LGPL.
I was surprised to see the recent announcement about re-licensing the analyzers from the LGPL license to a license written by Sonar.
My understanding is that the analyzers have been a LGPL work with many copyright owners beyond Sonar the company. (For example, the SonarJava analyzer alone has 136 unique authors dating back to 2012.)
I was not aware of any Contributor License Agreement requirement having been in place which would assign copyright for these contributions to Sonar the company.
Does SonarSource SA own the entire copyright for the the public analyzers? Or, is the copyright ownership of these analyzers a combination of code owned by SonarSource SA from it’s employees as well as community contributions?
If the latter, can you please help folks understand where those copyright assignments from community contributors to SonarSource SA took place?
I have been under the understanding that these codebases are LGPL licensed works which are a combination of SonarSource-owned contributions and community-owned contributions, and therefore that they would remain LGPL due to the copyleft nature.
Any clarifications would be appreciated!
Thank you,
-Bryan