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What are the legal consequences of changing the license of an open source product (github.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/opensource

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The (2?) maintainers of Fluent Assertions have changed the license in the GitHub repository from Apache 2 to a proprietary commercial license. This happened yesterday, it looks like the other 200 contributors were not asked. Commercial users can now buy a license for $130 per developer, per year.

There are some suggestions that the take-over and the new license are violating some articles in the Apache 2 license.

My question is: Suppose that -with reasonable certainty- the maintainers and new owners violated the Apache 2 license. Is there anything that can be done? Is there any way violations like this can be brought to court?

(I'm just asking, not using FluentAssertions and not involved nor affected by this).

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

As you noted, the real interesting thing is that having received contributions licensed under Apache compels them to maintain the attribution for those authors, even in a repackaged proprietary product. And you have to mention the Apache license you got the contributions under.

No major open source license has any expiration / revocation terms which the author could invoke unilaterally. Once you've shared it as open source, those versions stay open.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

Contributors rights are being violated then. This would only be legal if ownership over contributions was transferred via a CLA (Contributor License Agreement).

It doesn'l look like they have one even now (look at audacity for example which do have one), so I assume they had no CLA prior to this and every contributors rights are being violated by including their code in a closed license project.

There could naturally also be deals made with contributors to sign over those rights, there have been projects in the past that got enough developers to sign their contributions over and rewrote the rest. Doubt this makes sense for a medium-scale project like this tho.