Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwhypothetic | Hacker News Reader

If a project is licensed under the AGPL, does that mean contributions to it are also licensed under the AGPL?

Hypothetically if all the contributions were public domain code included in an AGPL project, then wouldn't the maintainer be within their rights to include those contributions in a closed-source version of the project?

View on HN

You cannot change the license on code that is copyrighted by another party, unless that other party has already licensed you to do so (e.g a release under version x of some license may permit licensing under the terms of later versions.). The whole point of open source licensing is to prevent future releases from being under more restrictive licenses. Copyright holders always have the option to change their own licensing, but they do not have such freedom if their code is a derivative work, especially if their access to the other work was through an open source license.

That much I understand, but what's the default license if the contributors didn't specify a license with their contributions? Is it implied that their contribution is licensed according to the full project's license?

Much of the discussion is assuming that because the project was AGPL, then the various contributions were AGPL as well. Whether or not that's the case is my question.

IANAL, but my understanding is that if their contribution is a derivative work (as most would clearly be), they would be subject to the same license restrictions that restricted their access to the original project. I.e. they had no permission to create the derivative work, and thus no right to release it under any license. If the contribution isn't a derivative work, then the project shouldn't be accepting it without a copyright assignment or license.

That would make sense, but then what are 'Contributor Licence Agreement's for?

If you contribute to a GPL project, your contribution is licensed under GPL, but it's your copyright, not the project owners. The Contributor License Agreement transfers the copyright from you to the project owner, so they may re-license (or dual license) in the future.

Assuming the project specified the license as AGPL, the contributions would be under AGPL as well.

Note that the project currently doesn't state any license (there's no license.md). No idea if there was a license specified before when the contributions were made.

> The whole point of open source licensing is to prevent future releases from being under more restrictive licenses.

That a point of copyleft licenses. It's not a point of permissive licenses. Providing a certain degree of freedom to the direct licensee is the common shared point of open source licenses, permissive and copyleft.

There is no canonical set of purposes behind any license, copyleft or permissive. The license drafter had their own goals in mind, but their terms get repurposed by others.

Even very popular permissive licenses have been written with contribution front-and-center in mind. See, for example, the contribution-related terms of Apache 2. The definition of contribution. The built-in CLA. The compromise on scope of the patent grant.

Fair point on the semantic vagueness of "open source", I'll exercise more caution. However, I think it was clear in context what category of licenses I and the main conversational thread are referencing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com