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Comment by plank_time | Hacker News Reader

How can they move the source code from open to closed source? They don’t own the contributions. I guess they hope the small contributors won’t mount a legal challenge or they will pay them off to transfer the rights?

Seems like a lot of effort for this. What is their ultimate end game? I’m not sure that this is worth all the money they have invested is it?

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> How can they move the source code from open to closed source? They don’t own the contributions.

It's in the article. They are having the contributors sign CLAs, which would allow them to do this.

The ones who don't sign the CLA, they will re-write that code themselves to get around it.

I'm not sure whether you can actually do that. The law works on provenance, not on bits.

There are techniques for reproducing copyrighted code in a legal way. The simplest one would be to simply remove all the copyrighted content (assuming it came from minor contributors) and clean-room a replacement.

Didn't racket do much the same with their switch over to mit?

The clean room method breaks the provenance.

This is not just writing stuff from scratch like all of us have done at one time or another with our own code.

Maybe they can use GitHub's Copilot to "rewrite" the code :)

The CLA provides for a dual license option, but does not impact the GPL nature of Audacity.

Audacity was/is/always will be GPL.

It’s hard to find but contributors are required to sign a CLA which allows the project owner to do what they want with the code.

https://www.audacityteam.org/cla/

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