this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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I'm not sure if you people are paying attention to the right thing. It's fairly common to do this. And it doesn't mean they can take away anything. Everything will still be AGPL and still available. Someone is then going to fork it and maintain it as it happened with lots of other projects. This just means they're also able to also sell it under different conditions, including your patches and contributions.
I think what you should pay attention to is, whether the search index is open or closed. That's something with significant impact. Not if they're able to monetize your small bugfix without paying you. I mean that'd be nice, too. But not a super big thing unless you contribute a substancial amount of code. I mean you get a whole open source search engine in return for signing away your copyright. And it doesn't change anything for the people using the software. For them it's still AGPL. And the maintainer could stop developing the software at any point, anyways. Could (and does) also happen to projects without a CLA.
The problem is they can, and that's not the point - I don't care if you make money with something I spent my time on willingly, I care that you're forcing me to say you're the full and sole owner of my contributions and can do whatever you want at any point in the future with them.
Signing a CLA puts the full ownership of the code in the hands of whomever you've signed the CLA with which means they have the full ability and legal right to do any damn thing they want, which often includes telling you to fuck yourself, changing the license, and running off to make a commercial product while both killing the AGPLed version, and fucking everyone who spent any time on it.
If you have a CLA, I don't care if your project gives out free handjobs: I don't want it anywhere near anything I'm going to either be using or have to maintain.
And sure you can fork from before the license change, but I'm unwilling to put a major piece of software into my workflows and hope that, if something happens, someone will come along and continue working on it.
Frankly, I'm of the opinion that if you're setting up a project and make the very, very involved decision to go with a CLA and spend the time implementing one, you're spending that time because you've already determined it's probably in your interests later to do a rugpull. If you're not going to screw everyone, you don't go to the store and buy a gallon of baby oil.
I've turned into the person who doesn't really care about new shit until it's been around a decade, has no CLAs, and is under a standard GPL/AGPL license (none of this source-available business license nonsense), and has a proven track record of the developers not being shitheads.
But that's just not entirely true. I think you're confusing this with some source-available licenses or these silly amendmends to licenses that make it defacto proprietary. But this isn't the case here. This statement in the CLA doesn't take away any rights. It gives additional ones (yet to them, not to you, that's true). And it's in addition to the AGPL. All of the AGPL applies in addition to the CLA. Every single freedom, just as if the CLA weren't there. You can use it, modify it, copy it, etc... And no one can take this away any more.
The "around a decade" of course applies. And none of that has to do with the signing away copyright per CLA. You also don't know if Linus Torvalds is around in 5 years and keeps maintaining the kernel to your liking. You also don't know if any of the big open source projects of today get bought by some shady investors and the next updates won't be free software anymore... These things happen. And it has little to do with a CLA (like this one). Happens to plain standard licenses without extras, too. And it does to ones with this kind of licensing. But this really isn't the distinguishing factor.
I think what you mean is modified licenses. Or similar additions that render something not open source anymore. I agree, you should avoid those projects at all costs. But that's a different story and not what this project is doing.
With this, it boils down to you don't retain control over your contributions. You're right with that. You're giving them away and now your lines of code are their's to do whatever they like. That's not how open source contributions without a CLA work. But you still get something in return. You get a whole project licensed to you under a permissive license. They just demand to retain full control over the project as a whole, including contributions. And you can decide if that's a cost you're willing to pay when contributing code. The 'rug-pulling' is mainly unaffected. They could do this anyways. Just that it involves some trickery when it comes to third-party snippets within the code and selling it under a different license. But lots of companies already demonstrated you can perfectly rip off the open-source community legally, and it's not substancially harder than with this CLA thing.
My point is a different one: While focusing on some small details of a hypothetical case that I think you got partly wrong... Have you checked for any big elephants in the room? Because I don't see anyone talking about the database / search index and whether that's available. The website is just a very small part and just the frontend to query the database. I'd say it's almost pointless to discuss what we're arguing about. I can code a search frontend website in a week, that's not the point. And completely irrelevant if it's open source... What about the data that powers the search engine? I think that'd be the correct question to ask. Not whether the frontend is 99% or 110% open source.