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Comment by lsaferite | Hacker News Reader

Early in my career I signed CLAs like this and contributed code under them. Later down the road I wizened up and realized it was free work for a commercial entity that was then relicensing my work under a closed source commercial license and making a profit. They are welcome to a profit, sure, but not if it is via closed source licensing of work that I contributed to the OSS community.

So, no more CLAs for me. If they require a CLA (that lets them relicense my work) then I'll just never contribute to them.

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I'm investigating combinations of proprietary and OSS models that combine benefits of both. I explained in the essay below that countered that false dichotomy as it applies to security/verification.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/05/friday_squid_...

My main stance, for now, is dual licensing. Any commercial use requires a license. Any other use is free. Both are perpetual, come with source, and allow modifications. Core staff of paid developers do most work. OSS contributors get free licenses, name recognition, and possibly gifts (esp money) for big contributions. Any improvements to the software must be sent back to software owner that redistributes it under the same license. Contract requires this happen post acquisition. If company stops meaningful updates or wants to abandon it, product is released under full OSS license and that's in the contract. Company is also a non-profit, public benefit, or just private with certain structure that helps force this.

What do you think of such a setup? Again, main point is to force any user to be contributing to its development or maintenance while ensuring it stays available and has key FOSS benefits. Would you contribute to such a dual-licensed, carefully-setup piece of software?

CLAs on their own aren't bad. All Apache projects use a CLA to ensure that the contributer has he right to contribute the code under the Apache license.

You are correct, not all CLAs are bad. That is why I said "that lets them relicense my work" to clarify that it's a specific type of CLA that I take issue with.

How else are they going to make a profit? Unless you're Red Hat, the "sell support" option just doesn't work.

If they cannot figure out a business model that lets them make a profit without them re-licensing and selling code the that I wrote, then perhaps they should be doing something else. As I said, I'm 100% on-board with them making money, just not by selling my code under a closed source license.

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