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Comment by kodablah | Hacker News Reader

This is not necessarily true. Sometimes it's needed to pivot to a better/different open source license without going through the pain of contacting every contributor ever. I have seen that pain in some projects that want to go from LGPL to MIT or something.

For many contributors, they're ok giving full ownership of their contributions to a project owner on the owner's terms. Some contributors may not be ok with that of course, but it doesn't mean that every project owner has nefarious plans with said code ownership.

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> better/different open source license

And that's why "open source" is a really bad term that no one should use unironically, unless they want to confuse the hell out of people.

There are protective (copyleft) licenses, and there are permissive licenses - and they're very different beasts. And it's, like, software licensing 101.

> that want to go from LGPL to MIT or something

I find this extremely weird.

In a sane world, picking a copyleft license must mean that you care about user freedoms and want to make sure they're respected no matter what happens. Because that's the whole point of picking a copyleft license - not about letting people peek or tweak some code, not about social brownie points, and most certainly not about marketing campaigns - but about granting users their freedoms.

Either people get confused about "open source" and pick... I don't know, whatever looks cool, without even understanding what they're doing; or they're giving up on their principles when they smell the money.

I can understand wanting to go from, say, GPL to AGPL, or GPLv2 to GPLv3[+] - it would make sense, as it all goes in line of protecting freedoms. But LGPL to MIT is truly a weird one.

(L)GPL to MIT is a choice many projects made when they decided they cared more about their code being used than about it staying free.

Copyleft licenses were the default choice at some point in time, but then in the '10s most big projects seemed to pick a permissive license, and many switched.

Yea, and the point is that they really should not have picked LGPL in the first place. If you pick a copyleft license, please don't do it because it's cool - do it if and because you care for what it stands for.

However, I thought about it and I think I can get the cases where monetary opportunities started to outweigh what's essentially are political ideals. Happens all the time, heh. I guess I can imagine person not being honest with themselves until the temptation really comes. Especially if it's about casual developers trying to have some money to live comfortably (as opposed to lowering their standards of living), rather than getting rich.

I can only hope it's that and not a simple ignorance.

> picking a copyleft license must mean that you care about user freedoms [...] they're giving up on their principles

This is a personal bias and disregards others' definition of true do-whatever-you-want freedom. Different project owners may think differently on what free means and alter the license to respect their principles (and may consider copyleft to be the restrictive/anti-free mistake made early on based on these same kinds of personal biases).

And many contributors don't really care what the project owner does with their code and the CLA lets them delegate responsibility.

It's been popular in the last decade and a half to think that freedom is when everyone, including massive corporations, can do anything they want with your software, including closing it and taking away everyone else's freedom. Don't people think it would be better if they couldn't do that?

People who value attention over principles are known as "pick mes" apparently.

> including closing it and taking away everyone else's freedom.

unless the corp owns the rights, they cannot "close it", nor take away everyone else's freedom. The old version that was open source licensed is always going to be available.

Unless you're talking about the additions these corporations made, which they keep closed, and charge you for it. But if they are able to charge for it, they deserve it.

Embrace, extend, extinguish - AGPL makes it harder and SSPL even harder still.

> But if they are able to charge for it, they deserve it.

This is an extremely black-and-white view. If I make a competing product to you and it’s superior to yours, then yes, I deserve profits (though of course consumers may still choose yours for a litany of other reasons). If a trillion-dollar corporation becomes a competitor, that’s not exactly fair. They can, if they want, spin up an entire team dedicated to the product, and by sheer numbers, they will win. Is it legal? Yes. Is it ethical? That’s subjective.

That example is exactly why many people will not want to sign a CLA.

Someone who is has a strong preference for copyleft licences may not want to contribute to a project with a permissive license.

The intent may not be for the project owners to use the code in proprietary software, but it would be to allow someone to do so.

Sure, and I think the CLA is a good signal to those that care about how their contribution is used to stay away. But for everyone else that's not concerned with that, the CLA is not inherently evil.

I wonder... if you do something with AGPL that requires releasing the changes back ... you don't need to sign a CLA to do that.

However that would also mean that the core project couldn't accept your changes without the CLA since that would also bind them to never switching the license or relicensing your contributions for an enterprise license.

... I think. My head hurts when trying to consider the implications for CLAs and AGPL and the endless debates that lawyers could have over this.

That's the core project's own fault and problem, not yours.

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