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by sandworm101 55 days ago
Yup, but contributors to OSS have generally given away thier rights by contributing to the project per the license. So stealing from OS isnt as bad as stealing material still totally owned by an individual, such as a drawing scraped from a personal website.

From a common FOSS contributor license...

>>permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions...

https://opensource.org/license/mit

... As opposed to a visual artist who has signed away zero rights prior to thier work being scraped for AI training. FOSS contributors can quibble about conditions but they have agreed to bulk sharing whereas visual artists have not.

2 comments

No, contributors to FOSS generally do not give away their rights. They contribute to the project with the expectation that their contributions will be distributed under its license, yes, but individual contributors still hold copyright over their contributions. That's why relicensing an existing FOSS project is such a headache (widely held to require every major contributor to sign off on it), and why many major corporate-backed “FOSS” projects require contributors to sign a “contributor license agreement” (CLA) which typically reassigns copyright to the corporate project owner so they can rugpull the license whenever they want.

Stealing from FOSS is awful, because it completely violates the social contract under which that code was shared.

You're still mixing up contributor license agreements with the kind of arrangements where the copyright is actually transferred and assigned "away" from the creator to another copyright holder (generally a copyright assignment agreement). This is far less common than CLAs.

I don't know what you mean by a rugpull exactly, but of course in theory you can grant/obtain very extensive rights under a CLA as well, including eg the permission to relicense your contributions under whatever terms the licensee prefers. CLAs are a great way to centralize the IPR in an open source project for practical purposes like license enforcement, but in case the CLA terms allow it, the central governing entity could also obtain the right to switch the license even to a, say, commercial one. (Such terms would usually be a red flag for contributors though.) And in any case, that kind of CLA wouldn't still close off the code already released under the previous open-source license, and neither would it prevent you from licensing your own contributions under terms of your choice.

The whole point of software licenses is that the copyright holder DOESN'T change. The author retains the rights, and LICENSES them. So, in fact, no rights are given away, they are licensed.