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Yep, I went for a coffee and realized that. But this is a consequence of the simplistic summary, as I warned. As everything, the devil is in the details! If we

by j1elo 5y ago

Yep, I went for a coffee and realized that. But this is a consequence of the simplistic summary, as I warned. As everything, the devil is in the details! If we look closer, I believe (not an expert, though) that without a copyright assignment your contribution would have to be kept with the same license. We'd be just getting into the fact that non-copyleft licenses typically allow to use the code for building proprietary software. But AFAIK the contributed code itself would need to be kept with the original license? (that's where my knowledge is lacking)

richardwhiuk 5y ago
What do you mean by "kept with the original license"?
- Proven 5y ago
  He means you couldn't relicense under another license. I think if the copyright is yours then you could.
- pininja 5y ago
  The proprietary+forked code would become a mix of closed and open source license, but just never get released so you’d never be able to get ahold of it.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  If you make a MIT project "Foo", not protected by a CLA and I contribute to it, then if your company uses Foo in a proprietary product they still have to give the attribution for my code as required by the MIT license, as my code will still remain MIT even if embedded in a larger non-MIT project. OTOH if I had signed a CLA, then your company would be within its right to entirely strip any attribution to give whatever license they see fit to the code I wrote.
  - richardwhiuk 5y ago
    Yeah, they'll have to attribute the code to you - the MIT license will always apply - but they'll only need to attribute you - they can make as many modifications as they like.
oefrha 5y ago
The contributed code under Apache would be like any other permissively-licensed third party dependencies used in any proprietary product; you add a copyright notice and possibly link to a copy (a courtesy, not even necessary), done. There’s no devil in the details. The entire codebase can be taken proprietary right now and there’s not a thing you can do. You’re free to extend the last permissively licensed version.

by j1elo 5y ago

richardwhiuk 5y ago

What do you mean by "kept with the original license"?

Proven 5y ago
He means you couldn't relicense under another license. I think if the copyright is yours then you could.
pininja 5y ago
The proprietary+forked code would become a mix of closed and open source license, but just never get released so you’d never be able to get ahold of it.
jcelerier 5y ago
If you make a MIT project "Foo", not protected by a CLA and I contribute to it, then if your company uses Foo in a proprietary product they still have to give the attribution for my code as required by the MIT license, as my code will still remain MIT even if embedded in a larger non-MIT project. OTOH if I had signed a CLA, then your company would be within its right to entirely strip any attribution to give whatever license they see fit to the code I wrote.
- richardwhiuk 5y ago
  Yeah, they'll have to attribute the code to you - the MIT license will always apply - but they'll only need to attribute you - they can make as many modifications as they like.

oefrha 5y ago

The contributed code under Apache would be like any other permissively-licensed third party dependencies used in any proprietary product; you add a copyright notice and possibly link to a copy (a courtesy, not even necessary), done. There’s no devil in the details. The entire codebase can be taken proprietary right now and there’s not a thing you can do. You’re free to extend the last permissively licensed version.