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Re:Rug pulls, forks, and open-source feudalism by account42 on Monday September 08, 2025 @08:18AM (#45167386)
> But here is where it gets particularly egregious. The above problem can also affect software under just a permissive license and no CLA. This is what happened to Incus and LXD. LXD was initially under the Apache license and the linux containers community, in collaboration with Canonical. One fine morning, Canonical just decided to take control of the project, prompting the linux containers community to fork it as Incus. For a while after that, both projects used to borrow code from each other since they had the same license. But then Canonical decided to relicense LXD under AGPLv3 + CLA. This means that it was no longer possible for Incus to borrow code from LXD due to license incompatibility, while Canonical continued to do so under a slightly odd arrangement. You can read about it in detail here: [2]

Well yeah, that's what you sign up for with a permissive license. Canonical could have just as well kept their changes closed source - here Incus (or others interested in Canonical's changes) at least had the option to also adopt the AGPLv3.

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