Add CLA and write a FAQ about the chosen license

[dzervas]

A lot of people in Discord have raised that the chosen license (elastic) is a bit scary.

I think a FAQ in the readme should address common questions and a CLA (Contributor License Agreement) should be required before the first contribution of a person.

I've gathered some questions:

• Can I host a CADmium instance for my family?
• Can I host a CADmium instance for my company for internal use?
• Can I host a CADmium instance for my company for my clients as a free service?
• Can I host a CADmium instance for my company for my clients as a paid service?
• If you choose at some point to stop developing CADmium, what will/can happen to the project?
• If I fork the project and change it (rebranding or adding a new feature) can I host it myself?
  • Do I have to publish my fork?

[20kdc]

...A CLA makes this scarier, as it gives CADmium Co preferential treatment which can be abused for rug-pulling.

With copyright assignment, such a rug-pull could be achieved trivially by relicensing the project (this is not a hypothetical, i.e. aseprite underwent this).

The choice of the Elastic license, with the history behind it (its creation being an attempt at rug-pulling those dependent on Elasticsearch), feels weird to me, especially as I'm not sure how safe it is for forks. Fact is, GitHub Pages is presently providing CADmium as a hosted/managed service, which as far as I can tell - not a lawyer, but I feel it's pretty obvious - violates the first clause of Limitations. This should give an idea of why this cannot be easily brushed off.

Given CADmium runs in the browser, the GPL would have been sufficient to cover any fork-and-extingulish tactics; if CADmium required or requires a server in future, the AGPL would have done similarly.

So I feel two questions should be added:

• With copyright assigned to CADmium Co, if they choose to alter CADmium's licensing, what happens to users relying on CADmium, even those that contributed?
• The Elastic License is not considered an open-source license. While I'm not a lawyer, in particular, the second and third clauses under Limitations appear designed to deter forking. Why does CADmium's organization claim to be developing an open-source CAD program? ("We're building a new open-source CAD program. We've gotten pretty far, but we need your help!")

A note: It is a useful measure of an open-source license that it functions just fine without CLAs and gives all contributors equal protection under it should the leaders of a project go rogue. (Copyleft licenses focus on protection against a closed commercial fork, while permissive licenses simply assume the ability to fork the last open version is enough.)