I am wondering if Minio Inc has rewritten the software in a clean room. Otherwise wouldn't they need to publish the source anyways? Since it is AGPL anyone might potentially be interacting with the software. Do they do that?
- Code written by the Minio team, which they have full ownership of and can relicense as they wish
- Code written by third party contributors, where Minio required the contributors to provide Minio a BSD license to use the contributions but only published it to other people under AGPL.
So the AGPL doesn't bind Minio themselves because of their licensing policy. (Which is why while pure AGPL might be the open source maximalist license, AGPL + CLA is almost at the opposite end of the scale)
If I get my patches upstream, then I don’t have to waste time reintegrating patches and rebuilding packages when I could instead be doing productive things.
Whats the situation for a AGPL fork , were one to use it can the company assert rights like they did to Nutanix.
but also seems i was mistaken about the status of linux copyright, they actually do have distributed copyright, apologies
DCO is something different, and not a rugpull mechanism.
Each author retains their copyright, and is not giving away anything, just licensing their contribution according to the project license.
https://developercertificate.org/
CLAs are a corporate tool for making money off of open source.
Could you not have a CLA that only allows the project to use a specific license?
If Minio just wanted to use the changes under AGPL, the contributor could just license them under AGPL, no CLA needed.
I'm a fan of that model. IIt allows for a path to funding, a legal framework to keep contributed code open, and also allows them license agility to more permissive license ass needed. I've started using that for my own larger projects too.
https://element.io/blog/synapse-now-lives-at-github-com-elem...