The Exclusive License to Make Money from the Community Contributions | Hacker News Reader

The Exclusive License to Make Money from the Community Contributions

jungu.me

39 pointspingsl12 comments

Hmm. Are the claims made in the filing true? How does that work?

Under what license is the code released?

If it’s some standard OSS license anyone would be able to distribute it commercially?

If it’s some kind of special license, allowing for only non-commercial use, can it really be called open source?

EDIT: Apparently it’s Hashicorp’s filing. And their CLA does not seem to give any special exclusive commercial license to Hashicorp. Further, e.g Terraform is licensed under MPL-2, which should make the claims in the filing hard to enforce, no?

[1]: https://hashicorp.com/cla

Presumably they mean "under a non-open license" (~"a commercial license") when they say "commercially".

From my understanding, the contributors only sign up the CLA with the company when making contributions to the company's OSS projects, that company thus claim they have the "exclusion".

Yeah, and sibling comment here make sense about their definition of commercial.

But still, someone could hypothetically roll up with a big bag of cash and try to get a license for all non-Hashicorp commits.

I don’t really see what the point of that would be though, since they would still be missing the (presumably large) part written by Hashicorp.

So what Hashicorp is saying is that they are the only ones that can (/have?) released their software under a closed license, thanks to their CLA.

But (as they themselves say in other places in the filing) they are still vulnerable to someone offering e.g hosted versions / forking and selling support or other complimentary closed source software, like plugins.

Had no idea that's happening in CLAs and company filings, good to know

This is the sort of issue intended to be addressed by the Qlovatech Community Trademark License. (https://qlova.tech/ctl/1.0)

Everyone should have the same rights to fairly & openly commercialise a shared-source/source-available project without treading on eachothers toes or restricting any user freedoms.

BTW not cool that commenting on jungu.me requires write access to your github account.

The actual exclusive license to make money from thin air is called being a chartered bank. Once a corporation is a bank it's major dependable income source is the creation of new M0 money supply as debt by giving out loans for far more money than the bank actually has.

This is the kind of centralized and nepotistic money creation we need to worry about.

The blog post is misinformed; I have never seen a CLA granting an "exclusive" license.

Of course it's true that CLAs are not symmetrical and when you sign one, you usually give more than you gain. That's why lots of projects do not use them and are perfectly happy with a signed DCO (Developer Certificate of Origin) https://developercertificate.org/

The exvlusive is not enforced by the terms in the CLA. It comes from the fact that contributors only sign up the CLA with the company when making contributions to the company's OSS projects, that company thus claim they have the "exclusion".

They sign a CLA that explicitly says

> 2. [...] You hereby grant to [...] a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license [...]

and

> Except for the license granted herein to [...], You reserve all right, title, and interest in and to Your Contributions.

I am amazed that their S-1 includes language such as the one shown in the article.

> The blog post is misinformed; I have never seen a CLA granting an "exclusive" license.

Given that the blog post is commenting on verbiage in an official SEC filing, I will give it a pass. However, this companies lawyers are seriously misinformed (unless they are using a noncommercial license).

Most crypto companies are OSS first.

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