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Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

Checkmate Stallman.

Not really. I'm a big fan of MIT style licenses, but it also means that Microsoft could at anytime start making proprietary updates.

It could mean we could start adopting it and then at some point down the road they could discontinue the open version and start making closed features/updates.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very pleased that this is the direction Microsoft is taking. I am just still very skeptical.

In fairness, as long as they have copyright assignment from contributors, they could just as well do that with a GPL software.

IANAL, but that would essentially require contributors to sign a waiver correct? That seems like a fairly large barrier compared to just being able to take contributors code and incorporate it into a closed project, no?

All major corporate open source projects have a contributor license agreement (CLA) which contributors must sign. Regardless of whether they intend to close the source in the future or not. See the VLC license change fiasco for why CLAs are very good: http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relice...

If it's GPL or MIT, then it can be forked, and the original owner can't force anyone to sign a waiver. The waiver idea only works as long as the original owner maintains control of the de facto distribution of a project.

Copyright assignments can preserve freedom if done properly; the FSF's copyright assignment, for example, guarantees that your contributions will always be Free (as in freedom). RMS' rationale in this case was to protect against a scenario in which FSF was overtaken/purchased, so GNU software couldn't be made proprietary.

The GPL doesn't protect against that either. They still own the code, either way, and can make new development closed whenever they want.

thats a good point - however they can relicense the code you have written on top unless you always give them the copyright

If you have permission of all the copyright holders to release the code under another license. You can't accept patches and then re-license without explicit permission.

The have it. Contributors to .NET Core are required to sign a CLA.

> It could mean we could start adopting it and then at some point down the road they could discontinue the open version and start making closed features/updates.

They could do that if it was GPL, too.

With MIT or GPL or any other FOSS license, if there is a sufficiently interested party, they can, however, maintain their own version starting with any Microsoft FOSS release; Free software doesn't mean that the original owner can't release proprietary derivatives in the future, it means that what has been released Free can always be used -- and maintained -- as Free software by anyone who wants.

Of course, there is a cost to that maintenance role, and you have no guarantee that someone will take it up if the original maintainer drops it or decides to release proprietary software instead. Free software gives you the right to spend your own resources to maintain it, not the entitlement for someone else to maintain it for you indefinitely.

MIT vs. GPL is pretty much irrelevant here.

What you're saying is correct, MIT vs GPL is irrelevant if Microsoft owns the whole copyright to the project.

Contributors to .NET need to assign their copyright to the .NET Foundation (http://www.dotnetfoundation.org/faq), which seems impartial but also has a board of 100% Microsoft employees. If .NET were GPL, then only the .NET Foundation would have the power to let others create proprietary extensions, which I guarantee they would give Microsoft.

Miguel de Icaza is on the board and not an MSFT employee.

You're right. I was under the impression that Microsoft had bought Xaramin.

No. Having used the MIT license means that Company X can take .NET, make its own modifications, distribute them in binary form and don't share them back as source code with MS or anybody else. Apparently MS isn't afraid about it.

MS is the copyright holder so they could make proprietary updates whatever FOSS license they used, GPL v3 included.

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