16
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
16 points (75.0% liked)
Open Source
31358 readers
81 users here now
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
- !libre_culture@lemmy.ml
- !libre_software@lemmy.ml
- !libre_hardware@lemmy.ml
- !linux@lemmy.ml
- !technology@lemmy.ml
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Depends on a few factors, AFAIK as a non-lawyer. If the license allows closed-source derivatives (i.e. is permissive rather than copyleft), then anyone can create a closed-source version with all of the contributors' changes, including the original maintainer. And anyone can choose to keep it open-source. The community contributions still to some extent belong to the contributors, though the license waives most of their rights.
Some projects are copyleft, but contributors are required to sign a license agreement (a CLA) which allows a single entity to change the license as they desire, including to closed-source - this is a good reason to avoid such projects. The contributors don't own their work in such a case, but they can still fork the old project as it was before being taken closed source.
In a copyleft (e.g. GPL) project with no CLA, it's illegal for anyone to make a closed-source version, and a major contributor could sue even the maintainer for doing so.
In all such cases, the change to a closed-source model does not erase the existence of the open-source code with community contributions. A fork is always possible.