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Comment by ensignavenger | Hacker News Reader

When you try to contribute code back upstream, the company will require you to grant them broad rights to do whatever they want with it, including to relicense the code you are contributing under a proprietary license. You do not get the same rights in return to the upstream code. So the company can yake your contributions and go proprietary and you have no recourse.

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I'm surprised it's not more of a thing to have a CLA that allows relicensing only to another OSI-approved license. I don't see many examples along those lines[0]. And the "OSI-approved" wording would allow a project to freely switch between MIT/BSD/GPL/etc or even create their own license (as long as they get it OSI-approved) without having to hunt down past contributors for permission.

I would never sign an open-ended CLA, though. For all I know, the project (with my code in it) could end up being bought by Oracle, proprietized, and used by Larry Ellison to construct the Torment Nexus.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement#...

Well, the point of the AGPL + CLA combo is precisely to be able to profit off of community contributions by distributing proprietary versions.

> I'm surprised it's not more of a thing to have a CLA that allows relicensing only to another OSI-approved license.

That would be meaningless - they could relicense it to MIT, distribute that MIT-licensed version to their subsidiary, and then have that subsidiary sell it under whatever proprietary license they wanted.

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