"We require our external contributors to sign a Contributor License Agreement ("CLA") in order to ensure that our projects remain licensed under Free and Open Source licenses such as MPL2 while allowing HashiCorp to build a sustainable business.
HashiCorp is committed to having a true Free and Open Source Software ("FOSS") license for our non-commercial software. A CLA enables HashiCorp to safely commercialize our products while keeping a standard FOSS license with all the rights that license grants to users: the ability to use the project in their own projects or businesses, to republish modified source, or to completely fork the project."
It's disappointing that the non-legal text on the page repeatedly suggested that signing a CLA would help keep HashiCorp projects open source when the actual text of the license agreement made no such claims.
> The CLA does not change the terms of the standard open source license used by our software such as MPL2 or MIT. You are still free to use our projects within your own projects or businesses, republish modified source, and more. Please reference the appropriate license for the project you're contributing to to learn more.
Someone should try challenging the CLA when the pretext of it changes (their contributions being relicensed to non-FOSS). Most CLAs are very dry but HashiCorp may be in trouble with all the proclamations in theirs.
I would agree except it seems that the Legal Terms and Agreement doesn't even mention any of that (even if the marketing part of that page does).
> You hereby grant to HashiCorp and to recipients of software distributed by HashiCorp a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute Your Contributions and such derivative works.
This pretty much covers anything they'd need.
(I'm not a lawyer.)
Never sign a CLA! The only reason they ask for such is to relicense, and the only reason they would relicense if they are already foss is to become proprietary.
Linux doesn't require a CLA for contributions. These open source cosplay clowns do.
"We require our external contributors to sign a Contributor License Agreement ("CLA") in order to ensure that our projects remain licensed under Free and Open Source licenses such as MPL2 while allowing HashiCorp to build a sustainable business.
HashiCorp is committed to having a true Free and Open Source Software ("FOSS") license for our non-commercial software. A CLA enables HashiCorp to safely commercialize our products while keeping a standard FOSS license with all the rights that license grants to users: the ability to use the project in their own projects or businesses, to republish modified source, or to completely fork the project."
It's disappointing that the non-legal text on the page repeatedly suggested that signing a CLA would help keep HashiCorp projects open source when the actual text of the license agreement made no such claims.