[teddyh]

> an AGPL with a CLA

You can’t require a CLA with AGPL. That would be an additional restriction, which AGPL does not allow. You can require a CLA for contributions to be accepted into your own distibution of the software (since you are not required to accept patches), but you can’t require anyone to sign or agree to a CLA if they recieved the software under AGPL.

It wouldn’t be fair either, I think, for you to sell the contributions of third parties as part of your software under a proprietary license. You can’t have your cake and eat it too; either you develop stuff yourself and get to sell it under whatever license you like, or you accept contributions from third parties all over the world under a free license, and you then sell the software to your customers under the AGPL, not a proprietary license.

You might be concerned about your customers then redistributing the AGPL software you sold them, but firstly, you might be able to fix this by requiring your customers to sign a contract with you (as part of the sale), where they agree not to do that, allowing you to sue them for breach of contract if they do. (I am not sure about the legal status of this scheme, however, and IIRC, the text of the GPL seems to want to at least discourage it.) Secondly, Red Hat allows CentOS to exist, and RH still makes a pretty penny selling RHE licenses. So this might not be a problem in practice.

EDIT: See also this post, linked by jboynyc elswhere in this discussion:

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/jan/06/copyleft-equality...

[ahnick]

> You can’t require a CLA with AGPL. That would be an additional restriction, which AGPL does not allow. You can require a CLA for contributions to be accepted into your own distibution of the software (since you are not required to accept patches), but you can’t require anyone to sign or agree to a CLA if they recieved the software under AGPL.

So, the term CLA might be too strong here. What I'm really wanting to do is add an additional term that allows for "any modification of the source code that is contributed back to an open source fork to then be reapplied to the proprietary product." This I don't believe qualifies as a "further restriction", because I'm just granting an additional right to the company to reincorporate the code into the original product and I'm not restricting the rights of the downstream user in anyway. (i.e. they can continue to offer a competing product and use it however they would like)

Section 7 of the AGPL say this at the end...

"Additional terms, permissive or non-permissive, may be stated in the form of a separately written license, or stated as exceptions; the above requirements apply either way.

To me what I'm asking for is a "permissive" additional term that qualifies under this section. Do you disagree?

From a principle perspective, I think as long as developers know up front (based on the licensing) that when they contribute code to and open source project that the code could be incorporated back into the original product, then they would be okay with that.

As I'm writing this, I had the thought that perhaps a simpler approach is simply to just open source it as AGPL from the beginning with the additional restriction to remove the Plyint trademarks from the code. That is fairly clearly spelled out in section 7 as a valid additional term.

[teddyh]

> allows for "any modification of the source code that is contributed back to an open source fork to then be reapplied to the proprietary product."

That’s not an additional permission. That is granting yourself a right; i.e. a requirement imposed (on the legal author of the contribution) to give you this permission.

> Do you disagree?

Yes, I disagree. The author of a patch owns the copyright on that patch. You can’t reasonably believe that requiring this author to give you permission to do something constitutes an “additional permission” which you are giving to that author. It is obviously a restriction imposed on that author, since they would not otherwise be required to give you this permission.

A “permission” can only be something which you grant someone which 1. You are in a position to grant and 2. They would otherwise be not permitted to do. In the case of a software license like the AGPL, you the copyright holder have the sole right to copy the software. The license you give to others to copy the software under certain conditions is a thing which they would not otherwise be permitted to do under copyright law. Therefore, this “permission” that you want to give yourself, regarding copying the code authored by other people, does not qualify as such, since you are not in a position to give this permission, since you do not hold the copyright to the patch.

> From a principle perspective, I think as long as developers know up front (based on the licensing) that when they contribute code to and open source project that the code could be incorporated back into the original product, then they would be okay with that.

Maybe, but you’d have to find some legal way to accomplish this.

> As I'm writing this, I had the thought that perhaps a simpler approach is simply to just open source it as AGPL from the beginning with the additional restriction to remove the Plyint trademarks from the code. That is fairly clearly spelled out in section 7 as a valid additional term.

Oh, I agree completely. This would probably be the best for all involved.

[ahnick]

Thanks for the cogent explanation. That actually makes a lot of sense to me.

> A “permission” can only be something which you grant someone which 1. You are in a position to grant and 2. They would otherwise be not permitted to do.

Did you pull this from somewhere? I would like to read more, if so.

[teddyh]

> Thanks for the cogent explanation. That actually makes a lot of sense to me.

Thank you! A lot of this licensing stuff actually does make sense if you just look at it the right way.

> Did you pull this from somewhere? I would like to read more, if so.

Sorry, no. Just from many years of arguing about licensing on the net. For further reading, I would suggest this:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html