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Comment by ddevault | Hacker News Reader

They're asking contributors to sign a CLA which assigns copyright for your changes to them. Quick reminder: do not sign this kind of agreement. It's deliberately designed for them to pull the rug out from under you and make this proprietary again after a period of enjoying the benefits of community contributions. Shame on them for asking in the first place.

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The author of the above comment has a blog post on CLAs, which was submitted to HN a couple years ago and drew quite a bit of discussion. That discussion is here [1], in case anyone wants more detail on his position or wants to argue against it without just rehashing things already dealt with.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18148365

This is important, +1.

If you want an example of what successful OSS looks like for over 10 years now, https://github.com/artsy, MIT license.

What do you mean "pull rug out of you"? If they decide to discontinue GPL edition, you are free to pick it up from where they left.

It signals that they're not making a long-term committment to open source. When they pull the rug out from under you, the community will have to scramble to put together a viable fork. It is a highly disruptive event that we've seen happen many times. Some communities never recover.

It is not that hard to fork. Just look at the sheer number of Chromium forks.

Even Firefox had one or two until recently.

On a different issue - Without such a CLA, can they dual-license and commercialise their product? How did MySQL work for example?

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