[palata]

Unless you sign a CLA, if you contribute to a project, you own the copyright for your contribution. And the owner of the repo cannot re-license your contribution without you.

So the question is really whether you are fine contributing to a copyleft/permissive project.

On my end, as long as I keep my copyright (i.e. I don't have to sign a CLA), then that's fine for me. If anything, any contribution I make makes it harder for them to re-license their project :-).

[remram]

They can't re-license to any incompatible license. If the original was permissive, that leaves many options.

[goodpoint]

> If the original was permissive, that leaves many options

...especially the option of making everything proprietary.

[palata]

No. Say you release your project "Foo" as open source (permissive) on project-foo.com. I cannot come and ask you to remove the sources from project-foo.com, and go to everybody who downloaded the code and ask them to delete it.

The version of Foo that you released as open source will always be open source. Now I can make a copy of Foo, use it in my proprietary software Bar, and ship Bar to customers without sharing the sources of Foo (but I need to share the license; all permissive licenses that I know require attribution). Foo is still open source on project-foo.com, I just don't distribute it with Bar.

I can modify Foo, and ship it to customers as a proprietary library (with attribution). My changes to Foo will be proprietary, but project-foo.com will still exist and will still be open source.

Now you own the copyright of Foo, so you can decide to start shipping it (and all new versions) as proprietary. But you can't ask me to delete the fork I made from your open source version, foo-fork.com. So that one will still be open source.

[palata]

That leaves options that are compatible with the original license that the contributor agreed to.

Seems fair to me :-).

[remram]

For example, you can send your contribution to an MIT or BSD project and have it turn into a closed-source for-profit product.

[palata]

Just like if you publish your code as MIT or BSD. It will still require attribution, and they still can't re-license it to something incompatible with the original license. Turns out that closed-source is compatible with MIT/BSD (still requiring attribution).

And the "closed-source" part will be only the new code added after your contribution, but the project itself will keep the open source license (so that you can fork it at the state it was when the authors decided to go closed-source).