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From the comments I don't get what is HN's stance for it? Could someone please ELI5 the arguments for and against this?

phkahler 4y ago
>> From the comments I don't get what is HN's stance for it? Could someone please ELI5 the arguments for and against this? HN doesn't have one stance. The pros are that "the project" or those running it have full control of all contributions. In regular open source this allows doing things like changing the license. It can be beneficial to change the license from say GPLv2 to GPLv3, or maybe to MIT if that's what turns out to be important. The cons include things like taking the code private and changing to only commercial licenses. This one also seems to suggest they might have commercial licensing in addition to open. In the end, a contributor can always take the code and fork it if something bad happens, but in practice it's best for a project to have a single central development effort. One project that comes to mind is Q-CAD. It's developer maintains a commercial/paid version that has things the open source one does not. Therefore a CLA is required to contribute to it. I suspect enough people decided "hey, I don't want to contribute to your commercial product even if the OSS version also gets my contribution" that very few contribute, and years ago an earlier version was forked to create LibreCAD. Sadly Q-CAD has since made major improvements - to toolkit and others - but the open version can't take those changes. So we have an open source version that is kind of old and a newer version not getting contributions.
- Xylakant 4y ago
  Q-CAD seems to be GPLv3, so the open source version could take the changes as long as they comply with the license. They cannot take features from the commercial version. A CLA doesn’t change that either way. LibreCAD can’t contribute back unless they accept the CLA. Or is the issue that the fork diverged and the work from the commercially supported version is progressing faster than the LibreCAD fork?

>> From the comments I don't get what is HN's stance for it? Could someone please ELI5 the arguments for and against this? HN doesn't have one stance. The pros are that "the project" or those running it have full control of all contributions. In regular open source this allows doing things like changing the license. It can be beneficial to change the license from say GPLv2 to GPLv3, or maybe to MIT if that's what turns out to be important. The cons include things like taking the code private and changing to only commercial licenses. This one also seems to suggest they might have commercial licensing in addition to open. In the end, a contributor can always take the code and fork it if something bad happens, but in practice it's best for a project to have a single central development effort. One project that comes to mind is Q-CAD. It's developer maintains a commercial/paid version that has things the open source one does not. Therefore a CLA is required to contribute to it. I suspect enough people decided "hey, I don't want to contribute to your commercial product even if the OSS version also gets my contribution" that very few contribute, and years ago an earlier version was forked to create LibreCAD. Sadly Q-CAD has since made major improvements - to toolkit and others - but the open version can't take those changes. So we have an open source version that is kind of old and a newer version not getting contributions.

Xylakant 4y ago
Q-CAD seems to be GPLv3, so the open source version could take the changes as long as they comply with the license. They cannot take features from the commercial version. A CLA doesn’t change that either way. LibreCAD can’t contribute back unless they accept the CLA. Or is the issue that the fork diverged and the work from the commercially supported version is progressing faster than the LibreCAD fork?