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Comment by trashburger | Hacker News Reader

Literally just don't sign CLAs. I made the mistake of signing a CLA for a piece of software which shortly after switched to a non-Free license, and will never ever sign a CLA again.

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It will be fun to do a search on the next release of Terraform for code which I have written while not under contract with HashiCorp (I am still the #8 all time contributor according to GitHub, despite not having worked on it since ~2017-8, when non-employed maintainers were summarily removed from projects by a middle manager).

I have not and will not sign anything which assigns copyright for OSS (even to the FSF), so it will be interesting to see whether all of that code has been rewritten.

Genuine Question. If it hasn't what is your recourse? I can't see a PR to remolve all your commits being accepted (even if it should be).

That’s a great question - I don’t know the answer. I’m assuming enough lawyers spent enough time on this that it is at least broadly ok, I’m mostly interested in how this was approached from a product perspective.

I'm very curious about this. I imagine HashiCorp has lawyers that are quite confident in the license change. IANAL, but I'd guess that the BSL is chosen in particular because it is somehow compatible with MPL in a legal sense? Or because, after 4 years, the license "degrades" into the MPL which gives them a loophole or such? I'm very interested if someone knows.

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