HACKER Q&A
📣 vixalien

Do you stay away from Contributor Licence Agreements?


Hello everyone. So a while ago I stumbled upon Shopify's Polaris, which is a React UI framework. It seemed like a nice project overall, and while I appreciate it being an open source project (they didn't have to do that), it has a weird licence which is basically a modified version of the MIT licence but with a clause that prevents competitive usage.

Now, the other interesting bit is that the project also has a Contributor Licence Agreement (CLA) which also seems to provide all copyright to Shopify. I don't really understand how these legal stuff work in software, but I heard that CLAs have been used in the past to profit off contributors by moving to another proprietary licence (MongoDB and Elastisearch did that)

Then do you (developers on HN) stay away from CLAs? It doesn't sound too risky for me, and I've probably listened to one too many open source activists.

Another question, if I may, would it be possible to relicense a fork of Polaris to MIT (removing the Shopify clause?)

  👤 Rochus Accepted Answer ✓
> Then do you (developers on HN) stay away from CLAs?

Depends on the CLA, but generally I do stay away. E.g. I never checked in anything to the official Qt repository because I don't agree the the CLA by QTC. Instead I finally made my own fork and call it LeanQt and LeanCreator (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/leanqt/ and https://github.com/rochus-keller/leancreator/).

The "weird licence which is basically a modified version of the MIT licence but with a clause that prevents competitive usage" is likely not even recognized as a true "open source" license.

> would it be possible to relicense a fork of Polaris to MIT (removing the Shopify clause?)

Likely not, because only the IP owner can determine who can do what with their IP under what license. If you use the software of an IP owner under a specific licence, you usually don't have the rights to re-license their work, even if you modified it.