[Y_Y]

Is there any way to show a real commitment upfront to openness?

As far as I know there's nothing that can stop a project from switching license (for for new code only, of course) and this can feel like a deception. There may be a legal/corporate mechanism I don't know about, like a permanent kind of charter, but it seems not.

The best option I can think of is giving control (board seats or copyright assignment or whatever) to trusted institutions like Apache or the FSF or Linux Foundation.

It seems too easy for big "open" endeavours to change their mind after they've built trust and a userbase. It would be great if there was a way to guarantee that that won't happen.

[kouteiheika]

> Is there any way to show a real commitment upfront to openness?

Of course there is. Don't require a CLA and use GPL instead of permissive licenses. Then any derivative work will have to legally be GPL compatible.

[zeckalpha]

More details on the why behind no CLA: There are dual licensed GPL/Proprietary projects out there. The trick is whether copyright is assigned to a singular entity. If copyright is retained in a distributed (but licensed) manner, then it is harder to relicense.

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

No. The solution is to use a different license, one that doesn’t allow contributions to be re-licensed in this way. This isn’t as complicated as people are making out. They just don’t want to admit that the license is operating as intended, but rather, their feelings about classical ‘open-source’ have changed. Admitting that would be admitting that the Software Gods of the last ~50 years are imperfect in their eyes, which is jarring for the sort of people that complain about these situations in the first place.

[sanxiyn]

The best option is to use GPL.