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Comment by erohead | Hacker News Reader

Please note our CLA explicitly include a clause to require Core Devices to distribute all contributions under an OSI-compatible FOSS license (e.g. GPLv3). So no contributions can be 'stolen'.

https://ericmigi.notion.site/Core-Devices-Software-Licensing...

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But OSI-compatible FOSS licenses include pushover ones like MIT, so even though you couldn't steal all of the contributions to make a proprietary fork, any other company then could.

The CLA very well allows them to use all of the contributions to make a proprietary fork. The license is irrelevant for that[1].

Calling it "stealing" doesn't help.

[1] I'd usually call it a distraction, a sleigh of hand, smoke and mirrors, but we have to give Eric credit for not burying the CLA.

well, their new app mentioned in the post is GPL.

but in the rest of the ecosystem a bunch of the inherited code is already Apache or MIT. so, i presume you have already forked the other repos to relicense them. can you drop a link?

I'm the first to agree that contributions can't be stolen in this scenario but read the threads I'm referring to. People feel that way anyway if you stop supporting a component or distribute your focus between a free and a paid tier.

What we need is more awareness that looking at the license alone is not enough to make an informed decision if contributing to a project is aligned with the contributors attitude and personal goals.

With that in mind: Thank you for putting the CLA right in the repo where it belongs and people can easily find it. Many organizations put a license upfront and bury the CLA. For a particularly bad example try MonoDB.

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