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That's completely normal for cathedral-style open source development. The FSF themselves required copyright assignment (not just a CLA) if you wanted to contrib

by lmm 2y ago

That's completely normal for cathedral-style open source development. The FSF themselves required copyright assignment (not just a CLA) if you wanted to contribute to GNU projects (e.g. GCC) for many years; several GNU projects still do. You only need to sign the CLA if you want to contribute to upstream, you can maintain your own fork if you want, and the code that is open source today will always be open source. Frankly I'd say Oracle is less likely to close it up in a scramble to try to monetise their open-source assets than smaller companies like Redis Labs - Oracle has plenty of products and makes their money from consulting rather than from selling code directly.

phoronixrly 2y ago
How can you compare the FLA with Oracle's CLA??? From the FSFA: > An FLA offers a special clause against this kind of situation, in order to protect the Free Software project against potentially malicious intentions of the Trustee. According to this provision, if the Trustee acts against the principles of Free Software, all granted rights and licences return to their original owners. That means that the Trustee will be effectively prevented from continuing any activity which is contrary to the principles of Free Software. You can name a few more rugpulls made possible by contributor agreements that permitted blatant abuse of power, and Oracle is also not innocent in this. Off the top of my head I remember the VirtualBox extensions fiasco. Oracle changed the license then started sending bills to companies.
- lmm 2y ago
  I don't know what the "FLA" or "FSFA" is (are they real things or is this an AI-generated comment?), but the FSF traditionally required copyright assignment, which gave them all the rights in Oracle's CLA and more.
  - phoronixrly 2y ago
    I meant FSFE. https://fsfe.org/activities/fla/fla.en.html https://fsfe.org/activities/fla/fla.en.html
    - lmm 2y ago
      A programme that seemingly only existed for one significant project, and is not open to new projects. Interesting, but hardly representative of the free software movement in general.

by lmm 2y ago

phoronixrly 2y ago

How can you compare the FLA with Oracle's CLA??? From the FSFA: > An FLA offers a special clause against this kind of situation, in order to protect the Free Software project against potentially malicious intentions of the Trustee. According to this provision, if the Trustee acts against the principles of Free Software, all granted rights and licences return to their original owners. That means that the Trustee will be effectively prevented from continuing any activity which is contrary to the principles of Free Software. You can name a few more rugpulls made possible by contributor agreements that permitted blatant abuse of power, and Oracle is also not innocent in this. Off the top of my head I remember the VirtualBox extensions fiasco. Oracle changed the license then started sending bills to companies.

lmm 2y ago
I don't know what the "FLA" or "FSFA" is (are they real things or is this an AI-generated comment?), but the FSF traditionally required copyright assignment, which gave them all the rights in Oracle's CLA and more.
- phoronixrly 2y ago
  I meant FSFE. https://fsfe.org/activities/fla/fla.en.html https://fsfe.org/activities/fla/fla.en.html
  - lmm 2y ago
    A programme that seemingly only existed for one significant project, and is not open to new projects. Interesting, but hardly representative of the free software movement in general.