Yeah, by giving the foundation all the power it needs to relicense it however it wants.
> Of having to track down potentially 10's of thousands of contributors that may be hard to find (or even dead) to get their consent?
That's the ideal situation. Make the copyright stuff so hard no one will ever bother trying to take over a project. Linux kernel does this. It will never be licensed as anything other than GPLv2 because it's virtually impossible to obtain the consent of all developers who ever contributed to it. The more Linux grows, the more people contribute to it, the stronger this protection becomes.
Also means if the license ever loses a legal case then the project will always be susceptible to that flaw since it cannot be corrected.
Think of a license as code. It currently works, but tomorrow you may find a serious bug, or, in the case of law, laws change outside the project, making a serious bug.
Now you cannot ever fix it.
And, in common cases, it protects the project from contributors wishing to remove their contribution later, breaking the project.
Linus could get a brain tumor and decide to revoke his contributions to the Linux kernel. Or his heirs could do it, since by law they get his copyrights, including all the code he ever contributed. Guess what that would do. Or any contributor to Linux can do it.
10,000 legal minefields is not a good way to run a project.
Another example: one day the copyright protection of Linux code is going to run out. That'll probably be a very fun day.
> 10,000 legal minefields is not a good way to run a project.
Agreed. Honestly I think these licenses shouldn't even exist to begin with. Copyright needs to be abolished.
DannyBee is an open source lawyer, his comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18148727) gives some other advantages of CLAs.
is that https://leastprivilege.com/2020/10/01/the-future-of-identity... ?
Interestingly though, there seemed to be no talk or discussion of finding new maintainers for the .Net Foundation project. Microsoft decided to update their templates for the upcoming .Net 6 to use the new, non FOSS identity server project(despite their being no real need for any identity server in these setups, and despite it no longer being FOSS).
Even more strange(coming from other FOSS platform communities) was how much shilling for Duende IdentityServer, and by Duende, was occurring in this thread discussing the development(buckle up): https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/32494 . Was really strange for a FOSS community to not be discussing the road forward for FOSS, but to be making arguments like "the license isn't that expensive" and etc. All this time the project is still listed as a .Net Foundation project: https://dotnetfoundation.org/projects/identityserver .
I was somewhat surprised when looking into the .Net Foundation rules that they don't require turning over the project in any way to the community or foundation. I'm wondering now if MS was just going along with the easy path to avoid even more drama while the dust settles and they shore up foundation rules to prevent this from happening in the future.
> Assignment and Contribution Models. The .NET Foundation uses either an assignment model or a contribution model for on-boarding new projects. Under the assignment model, a project transfers ownership of the copyright to the .NET Foundation. Under the contribution model, a project retains ownership of the copyright, but grants the .NET Foundation a broad license to the project’s code and other intellectual property. The project also confirms that the project’s submissions to .NET Foundation are its own original work (there are also instructions for any third party materials that might be included).
They accept both models (Contribution and Assignment).