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How do A/GPL provide security against the IP owner switching to a commercial license?

• gkbrk 2y ago
  If anyone contributed to the project under A/GPL, they cannot switch to a commercial license without removing all contributions first. Because they are not the sole IP owner any more. But if you contributed under the MIT license, you allow them to re-license as whatever they want.
  • michaelsbradley 2y ago
    I thought contributions-relicensing has to do with a CLA, or lack thereof, and not the project license per se. Happy to learn I’m wrong on that point, which sections of A/GPL cover that? EDIT: having thought about it again, I realized that I was bringing strong assumptions about a CLA being in effect, regardless of the specific license. So, without a CLA in consideration, relicensing is more viable (or more of a danger depending on your specific concerns) with MIT. If a CLA is in play then MIT and A/GPL are likely on equal footing, depending on the jurisdiction.
    • gkbrk 2y ago
      CLA doesn't matter too much. If you want to contribute to an open-source project, you can just work on your own repo and can work together with other people just like it was a real open-source project. The good part is, you can pull any improvements from the original repo that they publish under A/GPL, but they can't pull from you if they want to re-license their code later. So the community fork will always be ahead in features and bug fixes compared to the CLA-crippled repo.