> Open source is a commitment to your community. Once you make it, you cannot take it back. You don’t get the benefits associated with being an open source proj

> Open source is a commitment to your community. Once you make it, you cannot take it back. You don’t get the benefits associated with being an open source project if you have an exit hatch. You may argue that it’s your right to do what you want with your project, but making it open source is explicitly waiving that right. I open source things I write, and I love open source but I think this stance is disingenuous. Yes you should maintain your project in the future so that you don’t leave your users hanging to dry, but sometimes life happens and you can’t continue your open source project in its current form. With a CLA, the creators of a project that would otherwise be unable to continue the project due to lack of funds can develop a proprietary version that they can earn money from licensing to people. And hopefully they will continue to maintain an open source version that receives bug fixes and some features while certain other features are only developed for the proprietary version. Demanding that those who make open source software do so under strict conditions will only serve to deter people from making open source software in the first place, IMO. Certainly it can be frustrating to be a user of a software and have them close the source, but what would the alternative be? Probably that it just died, so for you the outcome would be the same. Open source is great. It saves time and money by letting people and companies make use of the work done by others to save themselves from having to duplicate the effort. But it is never going to be the case that we can demand that someone else continues maintaining a product for us for free. When a product goes closed source, from your point of view it should not be much different from had it shut down completely. The last open source version of the product is still available so if someone was goinging to step up and maintain it into the future they still can, and if they weren’t going to, well then it makes no big difference what the original authors decide to do anyway. Personally the main reason I don’t use CLAs for my projects is that I am using a very permissive license for most of my projects already, the ISC license, and I don’t foresee any situation where I would want to switch to another license for my projects.