Comment by chc
11 years ago
In fairness, as long as they have copyright assignment from contributors, they could just as well do that with a GPL software.
11 years ago
In fairness, as long as they have copyright assignment from contributors, they could just as well do that with a GPL software.
Copyright assignments can preserve freedom if done properly; the FSF's copyright assignment, for example, guarantees that your contributions will always be Free (as in freedom). RMS' rationale in this case was to protect against a scenario in which FSF was overtaken/purchased, so GNU software couldn't be made proprietary.
IANAL, but that would essentially require contributors to sign a waiver correct? That seems like a fairly large barrier compared to just being able to take contributors code and incorporate it into a closed project, no?
All major corporate open source projects have a contributor license agreement (CLA) which contributors must sign. Regardless of whether they intend to close the source in the future or not. See the VLC license change fiasco for why CLAs are very good: http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relice...
If it's GPL or MIT, then it can be forked, and the original owner can't force anyone to sign a waiver. The waiver idea only works as long as the original owner maintains control of the de facto distribution of a project.