Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ddulaney 448 days ago
We (engineers) actually wanted to for another GPL’d project! But because they didn’t have a CLA, the lawyers wouldn’t sign off on it — they decided that the main/current maintainer didn’t have the rights to relicense it for us.

We probably would’ve for LZO too; not sure why that fell through.
1 comments
yawaramin 448 days ago
> because they didn’t have a CLA, the lawyers wouldn’t sign off on it — they decided that the main/current maintainer didn’t have the rights to relicense it for us.

How would the legal argument be any different for MIT/etc. licensed software in that case? Would the lawyers sign off on using MIT-licensed software without a CLA? Wouldn't they make the argument that the provenance of the software and therefore its licensing is not solid? Seems like the only thing that matters is who has the right to offer a license to the software, not what the license is.

link
ddulaney 447 days ago
They just wanted the CLA to support the (paid) relicensing.

I think the reasoning (as it was explained to me) was that when people made their original contributions, they were agreeing to the license at that time (in this case GPL, but for other projects MIT). But the other contributors never agreed that the main maintainer could relicense their contributions for a fee.

The upshot was that we went with an in-house fully-proprietary alternative. More expensive, probably lower quality.

link