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Even with a CLA in place, you can still fork, improve and sell Synapse / Dendrite (or derivatives of it), as long as you follow the AGPL.

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With the CLA in place, there is no one true Synapse/Dendrite. There is the Element-provided AGPL version, and then there are X many private forks.

The very existence of those forks breaks the community's ability to truly collaborate. Private forks still participate in our ecosystem!

Isn't that already the case without a CLA?

With the previous licensing, yes. The change to AGPL would have ended the ability to make proprietary forks, but that ability was preserved by the CLA instead.

This means that the only effective result of switching to the AGPL is that Element can demand money from anyone who makes a proprietary fork. Basically, the AGPL has been backdoored for profit.

Well, paying the bills when you're a company whose primary project is open-source remains an open problem.

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