Hacker News Reader

I think the point BartjeD wants to make is that due to the nature of MIT licensing, they could run away with your contributions anyway, even without a CLA. Furthermore, Redis didn't have a CLA if I remember correctly and the relicensing is solely based on the what the previously used BSD license allows.

View on HN

Is that true? If I contribute to a MIT-licensed project without a CLA, my contributions can't just be re-licensed to some proprietary license, can it? Wouldn't my contributions remain MIT, even if they re-license all other parts of the project to some proprietary license?

Isn't the point of CLAs that you can re-license contributors' contributions?

MIT and BSD are so liberal that anyone can commercialize the work. All they have to do is attribute your parts to you, and not demand a warranty of you.

Why do corporate MIT-licensed projects have CLAs then?

(That's not meant a gotcha, I just don't really know how this stuff works)

CLAs in those cases may be more to cover their ass in case of disputes about authorship, the future of the project, or in case they forget attribution.

Interesting, I thought the point of not wanting CLAs was not giving them the ability to relicense your code under a more restrictive license (i.e. SSPL), not to keep them from running away with it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com