this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2024
537 points (95.6% liked)
Open Source
31365 readers
159 users here now
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It means previous versions remain open, but ownership trumps any license restrictions.
They don't license the code to themselves, they just have it. And if they want to close source it they can.
GPLv3 and copyleft only work to protect against non-owners doing that. CLA means a project is not strongly open source, the company doing that CLA can rugpull at any time.
The fact a project even has a CLA should be extremely suspect, because this is exactly what you would use that for. To ensure you can harvest contributions and none of those contributers will stand in your way when you later burn the bridges and enshittify.
What is CLA in this context?
I believe it's a Contributor License Agreement
Thank you.