The Exclusive License to Make Money from the Community Contributions

Re:The Exclusive License to Make Money from the Community Co... by filleokus on Thursday December 23, 2021 @08:08AM (#29661469)

Hmm. Are the claims made in the filing true? How does that work?

Under what license is the code released?

If it’s some standard OSS license anyone would be able to distribute it commercially?

If it’s some kind of special license, allowing for only non-commercial use, can it really be called open source?

EDIT: Apparently it’s Hashicorp’s filing. And their CLA does not seem to give any special exclusive commercial license to Hashicorp. Further, e.g Terraform is licensed under MPL-2, which should make the claims in the filing hard to enforce, no?

[1]: https://hashicorp.com/cla

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Re:The Exclusive License to Make Money from the Community Co... by detaro on Thursday December 23, 2021 @08:15AM (#29661513)

Presumably they mean "under a non-open license" (~"a commercial license") when they say "commercially".

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Re:The Exclusive License to Make Money from the Community Co... by pingsl on Thursday December 23, 2021 @08:38AM (#29661670)

From my understanding, the contributors only sign up the CLA with the company when making contributions to the company's OSS projects, that company thus claim they have the "exclusion".

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Re:The Exclusive License to Make Money from the Community Co... by filleokus on Thursday December 23, 2021 @09:27AM (#29662104)

Yeah, and sibling comment here make sense about their definition of commercial.

But still, someone could hypothetically roll up with a big bag of cash and try to get a license for all non-Hashicorp commits.

I don’t really see what the point of that would be though, since they would still be missing the (presumably large) part written by Hashicorp.

So what Hashicorp is saying is that they are the only ones that can (/have?) released their software under a closed license, thanks to their CLA.

But (as they themselves say in other places in the filing) they are still vulnerable to someone offering e.g hosted versions / forking and selling support or other complimentary closed source software, like plugins.

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