The Apache to AGPL re-licensing seems OK - considering that many other projects in similar situation chose non-FOSS licenses like BSL. But CLA replacing DCO? What will prevent the project from going closed-source in the future, without the approval of the contributors? This doesn’t look good for the project.
From reading some of the comments on this at HackerNews from others and from the CEO (username is Arathorn there), I think it is a change that needed to happen - though not an ideal one at first glance. I agree with twicetwice’s take most of all. For what it’s worth I 100% believe that they have everyone’s best interests at heart right now, and that they’re using the CLA to save themselves from getting buried by their proprietary opponents. I don’t make a habit of trusting anyone though, and I would really prefer to see this revisited in the future if at all possible. In the unlikely event that they flip the license to closed, I think the open-source side of Matrix should still live on through alternative implementations and nothing will be irreparably lost?
What are some of the competitive closed source proprietary apps they’re referring to?
Beeper’s one, though they only fork the Element GUI which isn’t affected by this.
TeamSpeak, Beeper, Towns…
