Comment by drob518
1 day ago
Well, yes and no. You can change it, but only going forward. A change doesn’t mean that WPengine would have to stop using it. They would have what they have, but they wouldn’t be able to use anything new, developed under new license terms. And I think a lot of the community would walk away from Wordpress and side with WPengine. There would be a high profile fork.
> You can change it, but only going forward.
I don't believe this is correct in this case; realistically, I don't think they can change it at all. As far as I can tell, the WordPress contribution process doesn't involve a CLA or CAA.
That means any license change for WordPress would require getting agreement from every single third-party contributor whose code is still present in the codebase; and/or, removing or rewriting code where the contributor (copyright holder) does not agree. In practical terms, that isn't going to be possible.
WordPress itself is also a fork, which further impacts the situation if any ancient b2/cafelog code is still present in the codebase.
The key point here is that without a CAA, third-party contributors still own the copyright to their code contributions; and without a CLA, the project owner has no legal authority to re-license that third-party code in ways which violate the contributors' license.
The "change it going forwards" thing generally only applies if a CLA or CAA was used; or if the previous license was a permissive one and the new license terms don't violate the old license terms in any way.
Gotcha. Yea, in that case it’s difficult. You can only change the license for things you created, and only for new code. If Wordpress has mixed in contributions from a lot of other people, then it’s impossible in practice to get permission from all of them (and some might even be dead).
In practical terms as long as no one sues they can do anything they want, if enough money on the table then yeah, someone's going to sue, and WP greatly meets that bar.
Had a project I was a major contributor on relicensed to appease microsoft of all things and I just didn't care enough to do something about it besides tell the person they were an asshole.
Let the chips fall as they may, no?
If there was a way to make changes entirely free of consequence, everybody would be doing it.
Yep, agreed. IMO, Matt just has sour grapes that someone was able to build a superior business.