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Comment by pyre | Hacker News Reader

> Essentially it allows some company to randomly re-license free contributions to turn them private/for-profit.

On the other hand, without signing over your rights, you can effectively hold up a project from moving forward. For example, if a project wanted to move from GPLv2 to GPLv3, IIRC, you can't do that without the permission of all contributors unless they have signed over their rights. And as @trestletech has pointed out not all contributors are created equal[1].

One the one hand, you have people making significant contributions (and you don't want to just stomp all over them), on the other hand you could have people making tiny contributions, yet are holding up everyone else.

[1]: https://github.com/datastax/nodejs-driver/commit/6f3c6b2f454...

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If you are a Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site, you might be able to get the FSF to issue you an oopsiedoodle-oo.

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html#section11

A contributor can have legitimate reasons for not wanting their code re-licensed. For example, the Linux kernel deliberately did not move to GPLv3. Would such a contributor be "holding the project up" or would they be rightly demanding that the license under which they contributed code be honored?

Obviously the devil's in the details of the terms of the CLA. I had previously thought the purpose of the CLA was to allow the projects organizers to make copyright claims in court, not to allow them to re-license.

My "holding up the project" comment was more in relation to people that make small contributions (e.g. correct spelling mistakes and/or typos), but (maybe?) legally still need to sign off on a relicense. In this case, it really comes across as petty to put up a huge fight.

What huge fight? The guy is just saying that he isn't willing to invest the time in understanding the full implications of the contract he's being asked to sign, and that they can pay him if they want him to bother. At a very reasonable rate, I might add, considering he's a software developer and that carefully reading a CLA might take an hour or more.

I wasn't aiming in particular at this person with the "huge fight" part.

It's an ambiguous question that AFAIK/IANAL doesn't have a clear-cut answer. A while after the GPLv3 came out Eben Moglen ventured an opinion that a work like Linux could probably, from a purely legal perspective, change licenses but he made clear that was just his guess:

http://www.cnet.com/news/linux-to-gplv3-a-practical-matter-n...

Some projects use "GPLv2 or any later version", though I'm not sure how that holds up legally.

The GPLv2 requires that all derivative works be licensed under the GPLv2 or any later version of the GPL. The maintainer can get a way with this in a way semantically equivalent to forking the project using a later version of the GPLv2.

As long as contributors are licensing their contributions under the terms of the GPLv2, they're also licensing them under all future versions.

> The GPLv2 requires that all derivative works be licensed under the GPLv2 or any later version of the GPL

No it doesn't. The relevant part of the license is:

Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.

ie, it's optional to use the "or any later version" language.

> if a project wanted to move from GPLv2 to GPLv3, IIRC, you can't do that without the permission of all contributors unless they have signed over their rights

You only need them to license their code under "GPLv2 or later" while you license the project only under "GPLv2". This way you're free to upgrade the license if and when you want.

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