[dgb23]

I thought the point of copyleft was mainly to protect the freedoms of users.

But apparently it’s also used as a filter of who can interact and benefit from it.

But I don’t really understand all of it.

One thing I always wondered about selling separate licenses alongside GPL:

Can the authors (holding the copyright) distribute code under a different license when there were external contributors under GPL?

[nox101]

> Can the authors (holding the copyright) distribute code under a different license when there were external contributors under GPL?

No, if any contributions were made under the GPL, they'd have to get permission to change the license to AGPL from every contributor or remove their contributions.

Most projects like this require you license your contributions in a way that lets them sell non-AGPL licenses (see their Contributor License Agreement) https://cla-assistant.io/paradedb/paradedb

So basically they can do whatever they want with your contributions.

[keskival]

By default the contributors also hold copyright and need to consent to the separate licensing.

However, this is typically solved by using a contributor licence agreement (CLA) where all contributors click through a form before submitting a PR where they declare that they own the copyright for the PR and they give a license for the organization to relicense the work and derivatives. Sometimes the whole copyright is transferred to the organization in these agreements.

I didn't check but according to some comments here the CLA in this case is already embedded into the AGPL license.

In principle this scheme guarantees that the original organization always has special rights over all of the open source community, as they can dual license all the derivative works.

[dgb23]

Thank you!

This might be a viable licensing scheme for Swiss government contractors now. The federal government requires open source licenses for all software projects as of last year or so.

(A)GPL+CLA might be a good way to ensure the interests of the both the Swiss people and the flexibility or competitiveness of contractors, allowing them to retain proprietary licenses where needed or wanted.

Follow up:

Am I correct in thinking that this might slightly hinder contributions on one hand, but ultimately anyone could still maintain an _independent_ fork?

Or in other words: Would contributions to a fork still require signing the CLA and essentially allow the original authors to dual license any such contributions?

[itsgabriel]

Contributions to a fork could be done under just the AGPL, without any CLAs (also to the original repo, but those won't be accepted). Then the entire fork is effectively AGPL only. I don't think any original CLAs would apply to the fork, unless the fork owner is the same legal entity/successor as defined in there. Same goes for the original authors, they'd need CLAs from all fork contributors.

[max-privatevoid]

Spreading copyright among as many entities as possible to make relicensing more difficult is not a problem you should "solve". It's a feature of the license. A CLA ensures that contributors will be treated unfairly, and I hope it deters many potential contributors.