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If this catches on, I expect a lot more people on Hacker News will suddenly have Grave Concerns about how Free those Copyleft licenses are.
by msla 4y ago
If this catches on, I expect a lot more people on Hacker News will suddenly have Grave Concerns about how Free those Copyleft licenses are.
- pjmlp 4y agoThat have always been clear from the beginning that is why you get everyone using GNU/Linux instead of the BSDs, although Apple and Sony enjoy using parts of them on their platforms.
- josephcsible 4y agoThe problem in this case isn't with the copyleft licenses. It's with the CLA (i.e., "even though my project is copyleft, if you want to contribute to it, you have to give me a pushover license to your changes too"). Without the CLA, this project would indeed be safe from him doing this.
- xyzzy_plugh 4y agoI'm confused. Copyleft doesn't grant a right to contribute upstream. It's perfectly reasonable for a maintainer of a copyleft project to say "I only accept contributions if you give me $1,000." Copyleft grants you the right to make changes and redistribute the resulting work under a compatible license. If you have a problem with CLAs, don't sign them. Many people do not care. Even without a CLA the author could simply remove contributions and still relicense. This isn't novel, and has been done before. Obviously it may be difficult to remove contributions.
- josephcsible 4y agoIt's rare for an important software project to be 100% a one-man show. Combined with the difficulty of removing contributions, wouldn't rejecting CLAs basically keep this kind of thing from happening at all?
- xyzzy_plugh 4y agoAt what cost? The livelihood of the maintainer? Nah.