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I'm curious about the legal process of relicensing. Did they have significant open source contributors from outsiders? If so, did they have copyright assignment

I'm curious about the legal process of relicensing. Did they have significant open source contributors from outsiders? If so, did they have copyright assignment? And if not, then how valuable is it to them to be open source in the first place? (Not trying to cause trouble; I admire Cockroach DB and its founders greatly! But I've watched open source struggle with this kind of thing for 20+ years and am increasingly curious about why businesses choose to open source their core technology.)

vortico 7y ago
If community patches are licensed under MIT or BSD, all CockroachDB has to do is include those license texts in their proprietary distribution, which is the only requirement by both licenses. Proprietary derivative works are allowed under MIT and BSD.
- paxys 7y ago
  It's different in this case, since there isn't a separate proprietary distribution. The entire codebase is being relicensed.
  - vortico 7y ago
    That's not how it works. Each commit is a "derivative work" of the last. If today a codebase is licensed under MIT, tomorrow you can change a single line of code, and this produces a brand new work under US and international copyright law. You can license this work under any license, provided you comply with the MIT license of the work that has been derived.