Do they not need permission from the nearly 500 contributors to do this?

r3bl · on March 31, 2016

Not if they requested the contributors to sign the Contribution License Agreement (CLA) before accepting their changes.

Or, the other way (although I can't guarantee that this is true) would be to choose a compatible license with the one they were using before. Compatible license scenario basically means that the license changes are small enough so that they don't have to request from people to agree with the change.

jevinskie · on March 31, 2016

And they do. I've seen their pull request bot block a merge many a time because of a lack of a signed CLA.

cyphar · on April 1, 2016

No, because they signed CLAs. And this is yet another reason to not ever sign a CLA for a free software project. You never know if your code will become proprietary (especially if it is a copyleft license). Sadly, this is also why I'll never contribute to GNU projects.

Spivak · on April 1, 2016

You're worried that a GNU project will relicense code in a way that allows proprietary software? I mean you're not wrong -- they technically could do that but you honestly expect them to?

15155 · on April 1, 2016

I will shit a brick if RMS ever betrays his ideals. It's almost unthinkable.

cyphar · on April 1, 2016

Well, it's more about what happens if something bad happens to the FSF? What if they get acquired and then $BigCo gets all of the copyright assignments. I don't believe that the FSF would betray people like that, but there may be situations where they don't have a choice.

the_why_of_y · on April 2, 2016

This is an unlikely scenario. The FSF is a 501(c)(3) charity, which means they have to work for the benefit of the general public and not to give an advantage to any particular person or for-profit company. If they would ever do the latter, the following IRS audit would not be fun.

https://www.irs.gov/Charities-&-Non-Profits/Charitable-Organ...

Many proponents of copyright assignment to for-profit corporations have argued that "it's just the same thing as what the FSF does, so it's fine", but their legal nonprofit status makes it a substantial difference.

A better argument against the FSF's copyright assignment practice is that it is bureaucratic overhead for somewhat questionable benefit.

cyphar · on April 3, 2016

I've actually discovered since that the FSF's CLA actually explicitly states that you give them your copyright under the condition that they always provide it under a copyleft license. So it looks like I was wrong about that and might even start contributing to GNU projects.