this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
3 points (100.0% liked)

Open Source

31365 readers
142 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

@OpenSource@mastodon.social @opensource@lemmy.ml I was just curious. If a project is started as opensource and we have bunch of community members contribute to the project, either to the code or financially. What happens to the community contributions when that project decides that it is no longer going to be opensource?

Are there no license restrictions against this practice as the contributors were led to believe that they are contributing to an opensource project.

Can they close source community contributions?

top 4 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] ipacialsection@startrek.website 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Depends on a few factors, AFAIK as a non-lawyer. If the license allows closed-source derivatives (i.e. is permissive rather than copyleft), then anyone can create a closed-source version with all of the contributors' changes, including the original maintainer. And anyone can choose to keep it open-source. The community contributions still to some extent belong to the contributors, though the license waives most of their rights.

Some projects are copyleft, but contributors are required to sign a license agreement (a CLA) which allows a single entity to change the license as they desire, including to closed-source - this is a good reason to avoid such projects. The contributors don't own their work in such a case, but they can still fork the old project as it was before being taken closed source.

In a copyleft (e.g. GPL) project with no CLA, it's illegal for anyone to make a closed-source version, and a major contributor could sue even the maintainer for doing so.

In all such cases, the change to a closed-source model does not erase the existence of the open-source code with community contributions. A fork is always possible.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Quick comment about posting to lemmy: the first line (when followed by a blank line) is taken as the title of the post, so things work much better if you put your tags at the end or in the body and, if you can, write a first line that can work as some sort of title. With this post, we’ve got the tags and their URLs in the title.

[–] LordChaos82@fosstodon.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@maegul Thanks for the heads up. I cross posted from mastodon and still trying to figure out how this all works. Appreciate the input.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

No worries!

If it helps, I made a little demo as a guide for cross posting from masto (there’s a thread there too with a link to the lemmy post created): https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/110483509521476095