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Comment by waisbrot | Hacker News Reader

Reinventing GPL with less care. I can copy the code, re-license as plain-MIT, and now commercial companies can use it for free.

A dual GPL-commercial license is the correct way to handle this. A more useful contribution to the license landscape would be to define a commercial sibling-license to the GPL that described how license payments would be disbursed.

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I would like a companion contributors agreement to the GPL that provides the correct legalese to assign copyright back to the project owner.

I decided to go the GPL route, but am not currently accepting contributions. I've managed to successfully license the code under a companion license, which is doable since I'm the only copyright holder.

My thoughts are that there should be a contrib fork for major contributions that authors wish to maintain copyright over, but for minor contributions/bug fixes the author probably doesn't care and it would be better for everyone if the contribution was integrated into the core repository.

I personally feel that assigning copyright on commit is a stopgap.

What if you die? What if you abandon the project? How can a fork of your project work with that if they want to change the license down the road? Copyright basically lasts forever now, so any choice about "assignment" will last forever.

Personally I really feel we need a solution that allows the current "maintainers" to have control over it. I don't really know what that would legally look like, but I've been hit by issues from open source copyright too many times to consider it a "solved problem".

Perhaps a new license "framework" that allows each contributor to say how they want to allow their contributions to be used in the future? I honestly don't know, but the current solutions are holding us back in some ways.

Assign copyright to Apache or an equivalent organisation, that takes care of governance past the single maintainer.

In any case this is worse if there are multiple contributors each owning their copyright, not simpler.

I feel it really depends on the type of project. In my case the code is rather niche and would only really be licensed by a small number of companies doing embedded robotics or AR. However, this type of stuff is also fun for hobbyists, so I wanted to make it available. I don't foresee a huge developer community springing up around this, and since I'm the only person who will realistically be making major contributions and I'm working on it more or less full time, I need a way to fund it.

The real problem for me isn't major contributions, if these started coming in I may reevaluate my position. The problem is minor bug fixes where the complexities of acquiring another copyright holder outweigh the benefits of accepting the contribution.

As above, I don't have a good solution.

it's pretty straightforward, there just needs to be a legal entity (ie, a corporation) representing and controlled by 'the maintainers', to assign copyright to.

The easiest way to do this is under the umbrella of a foundation like ASF. But you could create an LLC or any other form of corporation with no income or assets other than the copyrights it holds, if you want. There would be at least some minimal annual registration costs etc.

Any framework that allows contributors to _individually_ set terms for their contributions is going to be pretty unworkable, as the actual terms for the whole product become the union of any term any contributor has ever set or something, a mess.

Seems to me like the authors are trying to restrict the use of the software by commercial pursuits, not the distribution. The GPL does the latter, but says nothing about the former.

I can copy the code, re-license as plain-MIT

You can't relicense someone elses code. You dont have the right to do that.

If you fork this code, only your changes would be under MIT. So you would have a mixed-license project, and users would need to comply with both licenses.

If you don't want to use this license, you have to fork it from before the license change... giving up the changes that were made after the new license takes effect.

You're right, but both the MIT and the non-commercial portion of this new license explicitly grant the right to sublicense. It's not obvious to me that a free use case can't sublicense its use to a huge organization.

sublicense != relicense. You can't remove restrictions. All of the terms of the license would remain. That organization would still need to pay the fee.

If it was possible to re-license something in a way that removed restrictions from the original license, then no license would be worth anything. You could do a relicense end-run around any terms you wished.

(As another commenter said,) sublicensing does not permit you to grant any rights under the new license that you yourself have not been granted under the original.

I think actually you can. If you rewrite 75%? 80%? You can relicense it. Legally I think the law views that as new code not a modification. A lawyer may need to correct me but I seem to recall something like this.

Most certainly not. I recall that, in the SCO vs. IBM case, they discussed copyright of individual code snippets, on the range of a dozen lines of code, that were part of a bigger codebase.

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