Hacker News Reader

Comment by rhacker | Hacker News Reader

Does it make sense to announce that a company has "acquired" an open source project? Wouldn't it make sense to title and write the article that the company that writes most (or all) of the code was acquired? "Light Code Labs, LLC."

View on HN

Light Code Labs was not acquired; just the Caddy and CertMagic projects and their assets.

Would it be safe to say then, that Apilayer has simply acquired the trademarks and the domain name of an open-source project?

Edit: If the entire project is licensed under Apache License 2.0, what does acquiring the copyright give? The ability to change the license going forward?

And the copyright, dude. And literally what else is there? That's the project itself.

And copyright?

They probably also acquired the copyrights the seller held on the code, allowing them to use them as they see fit ( for example integrate them in products that have incompatible license requirements)

Open source projects still have a copyright holder with special rights.

Don't contributors retain the rights on their contributions in most cases? I see nothing about contributor agreements or copyright assignment in Caddy's repo.

We use a CLA bot and ask contributors to sign it with their github account. For example, from a random open PR from a first-time contributor: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/pull/3680#issuecomment-...

That CLA doesn't seem to assign any copyright, just attest that the user has the right to license it under the license.

This. That CLA does not assign copyright, so they can't relicense. I'm sure they know that though and either scrubbed those out at some point or are pursuing other ways of monetizing it.

It is interesting to me that an open source project would be acquired, which is literally the trademark and copyright. However since the copyright is literally governed by copyleft they really can't change anything unless every contributor agrees or they actively re-write the code that scrubs non-agreeing contributors.

In any event someone could fork today, and rename it Cuddly Server as long as the copyleft stays in place. See Jenkins/Hudson.

It seems their repo conveniently neglects to mention that there are, in fact, about 60 copyright holders:

https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/blob/master/AUTHORS

Every open source project has IP (intellectual property) associated with it, such as its brand name, domain name, etc. This can be acquired or transferred separately from the company which writes the code.

Yes? Just like Apple bought CUPS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com