[BadBadJellyBean]

I am wondering if Minio Inc has rewritten the software in a clean room. Otherwise wouldn't they need to publish the source anyways? Since it is AGPL anyone might potentially be interacting with the software. Do they do that?

[Macha]

The copyright for Minio consists of:

- Code written by the Minio team, which they have full ownership of and can relicense as they wish

- Code written by third party contributors, where Minio required the contributors to provide Minio a BSD license to use the contributions but only published it to other people under AGPL.

So the AGPL doesn't bind Minio themselves because of their licensing policy. (Which is why while pure AGPL might be the open source maximalist license, AGPL + CLA is almost at the opposite end of the scale)

[rzerowan]

Question , can MinIO the company assert AGPL copyright against the fork - i see in the writeup they mentioned trademarks as far as the fork is concerned.

Whats the situation for a AGPL fork , were one to use it can the company assert rights like they did to Nutanix.

[Macha]

As long as the fork complies with the terms of the AGPL, Minio can't stop them from using the code. As the article acknowledge,s hey could potentially rely on trademarks to make them rename it.

[patmorgan23]

Doesn't that depend on the CLA?

Could you not have a CLA that only allows the project to use a specific license?

[Macha]

You could, but the reason that companies ask for CLAs is to free themselves by that restriction.

If Minio just wanted to use the changes under AGPL, the contributor could just license them under AGPL, no CLA needed.

[Arcuru]

There are several companies I've seen that use a CLA primarily to sell AGPL exceptions so they can actually fund development, Element for example [1]. Some even word the CLA to require them to keep contributions available under an OSI-approved license.

I'm a fan of that model. IIt allows for a path to funding, a legal framework to keep contributed code open, and also allows them license agility to more permissive license ass needed. I've started using that for my own larger projects too.

https://element.io/blog/synapse-now-lives-at-github-com-elem...

[Macha]

Being able to sell AGPL exemptions is freeing themselves from the obligations of the AGPL. Fundamentally Element’s structure is the same as Minio’s in the lack of guarantee to external contributors that their changes won’t be incorporated into a closed source fork. So elements use of the CLA is standard rather than novel

[throawayonthe]

the FSF position is that GPL is unenforceable without a single copyright owner, which is why almost all gnu projects, linux, canonical/redhat/etc projects have a CLA or something functionally similar

[yencabulator]

Linux has no CLA.

DCO is something different, and not a rugpull mechanism.

Each author retains their copyright, and is not giving away anything, just licensing their contribution according to the project license.

https://developercertificate.org/

CLAs are a corporate tool for making money off of open source.

[Macha]

That would seem a bizarre position from the FSF, since it would make the license on combined GPL works unenforceable. Do you have a source for that?

[nine_k]

GPL maternally depends on copyright enforcement. Who would sue if an infringement is detected? All the contributors collectively?

[Macha]

As with a lot of the past Linux based enforcements of the GPL, any of the contributors

[throawayonthe]

main point is expressed here i think: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html

but also seems i was mistaken about the status of linux copyright, they actually do have distributed copyright, apologies

[phoronixrly]

Was going to mention the CLA. Each time you sign a CLA you're doing free work. Never do that. Keep and maintain your patches locally instead.

[bigfatkitten]

Sometimes that’s far more work than it’ll ever be worth.

If I get my patches upstream, then I don’t have to waste time reintegrating patches and rebuilding packages when I could instead be doing productive things.

[tfolbrecht]

Only if they'd taken contributions without authors signing over their rights.

[polskibus]

Surely MinIO dual-licenses its software so paying customers get commercial license?