Doubly so when they relicense outside contributors' work with a closed source license because those contributors signed a CLA.
And lets be real here: https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/graphs/contributo...
Looking at the details of that, the only two (small) substantial code changes from other people are "User can delete their own account" from 2020, and "Use cloudflare online dns api to perform domain check" from 2021.
I have no horse in the race, just think that maybe this project is not a good measure of contributions.
That's why I said "most people" (of which I think HN commenters are not a representative sample) rather than "nobody" :)
A commitment that any significant derivative retain the original (or some later version) of the original license.
"Free to do whatever as long as it retains this license. A commitment that this license will not change, even by the original author".
No special cases, just a blanket license for all derivatives.
If it exists, what are the barriers to adoption? Why don't we all use it?
(What I'm given to understand does work is using a copyleft license and taking code from multiple parties without a CLA, because then relicensing requires all the copyright owners to agree, which for a large enough project is impractical.)
It is quite fun to try and think of ways that this could work though. Perhaps a bot that code-paraphrases (paracodes?) every accepted PR. Or maybe there's some crypto magic you could do to make the only option a clean room rewrite.
It’s possible to say anything. Without something like a contract with reciprocal commitments to make it binding, the legal effect of saying it is limited (though not necessarily zero, because legal concepts like promissory estoppel exist.)
Unless you’re entering into a contract with the project maintainer (which you’re not, if you’re just downloading or using it) then such a commitment means nothing.
Applying an open source license to your work means you’ve licensed other people to use it under those terms.
You can make all the commitments you want in the license, but it doesn’t actually commit you to keeping all future work open source as well under the law.
So you could write this license and make the commitment, but if you changed your mind later and decided not to open source future commits to the project that you made then nobody could stop you. Not unless you had entered into a contractual agreement with them and exchanged some consideration (money).
> If it exists, what are the barriers to adoption? Why don't we all use it?
My theory is that people in general don’t care that much, or (particularly in the case of corporations) consider permissive licenses to be ”freer” than copyleft.