If you contribute to a project, you have no entitlement, moral or otherwise, to _future_ contributions to that project that others choose to make. Future contri

If you contribute to a project, you have no entitlement, moral or otherwise, to _future_ contributions to that project that others choose to make. Future contributions may be made under different terms, as you point out. The project might stop development, get forked privately, and you may never see active future developments distributed again. This is self evident from the licences themselves but also clearly reasonable if you consider the proportions of contributions made. Why should a contributor get rights to all future work on a project made primarily by others solely by making a contribution? > ...and the open source contributors walk away with nothing? Nope. As others have pointed out, they walk away with the Free Software licensed version of the code to which they contributed, together with their contributions. This code base does exactly what it did at the time of their contributions.