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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.

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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

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