[joeyhage]

Everything Cloudflare is announcing could have been done without acquiring VoidZero. The part they aren’t saying is the greater influence they will have on the roadmap and protecting themselves from someone else acquiring vite and making it closed source and/or monetizing it. We’ve seen it so many times - a project promises to stay free and open source, but things change. Are there any licenses or contracts that a project could use and would hold up in court that they need to stay FOSS forever?

[shimman]

This is why we need to start advocating more public investment into open source technology. Imagine how much better the state of our industry would be if we gave 100,000 open source developers a $100,000 grant. This modest $10,000,000,000 fund would be extremely tiny compared to the bloated private research we see annually at corporations.

Such a wasted amount of capital doing fuck all when there can be real value and economic gain if we supported open source without the influence of VC + big tech that seem to want a return to feudalism, exacerbate the climate crisis, and hoard as much wealth as possible.

A better world is possible.

[conartist6]

>Are there any licenses or contracts that a project could use and would hold up in court that they need to stay FOSS forever?

I don't understand, the existing licenses say that, and courts uphold them to say that. If a company has given code to you under an OSS license, that code is yours under that license forever. There'd be no point in trying to bind a person to give you all their future creative output for free just because they had given some of it to you for free. That'd be awful! And anyway we don't need courts to fix this because people can fix it just by helping each other maintain open software

[joeyhage]

What I meant was the project would stay FOSS forever, so that would mean all future updates including features, bug fixes, and patches. My understanding is the license can be changed at any time so then you would only have FOSS access for the code up until the point in time the license changed.

That said, I completely agree that there’s a better solution.

[conartist6]

Unless you literally own me, how would you possibly prevent me from doing new work without giving it to you? Even if I were under an employment contract that assigns all my intellectual property to you, as a free person I would be free to quit that job and cease giving you any further IP.

For the record that my suspicion is that bug fixes to open code are very likely not copyrightable due to the principle of convergence, though I am not a lawyer and to my knowledge this issue has never been tested in court. New features would very much be copyrightable.

[yencabulator]

> Are there any licenses or contracts that a project could use and would hold up in court that they need to stay FOSS forever?

The Linux kernel is GPL with likely at least hundreds of copyright holders and no CLA, that means there is no way for someone to say "I am the legal owner and the new development will be under a proprietary license".