The OpenTF Manifesto expresses concern over HashiCorp's switch of the Terraform license from open-source to the Business Source License (BSL) and calls for the tool's return to a truly open-source license.
Since when changing the license of software you need to request sign-off from all the Copyright holders, the CLA granting a perpetual copyright license allowed for unilateral change to be made to the project's software license.
As OpenTofu is going to be under the Linux Foundation's umbrella (where most projects seem to use EasyCLA) and there's already been mention of a potential new CLA I'm asking here if that is in fact the intention going forward.
If that is the case I'd be curious to understand why this decision was taken when the lesson here seems to me that "the community" at large can not trust promises of good will when faced with the reality of possible unilateral re-licensing.
I'm no lawyer but the LF CLA doesn't seem materially different to the Hashicorp one
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1. Easy relicensing:
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There are benefits in relicensing being hard because it results in stable legal expectations around a project and encourages projects to consult their contributor communities before undertaking significant legal policy changes.
For successful relicensing the agreement of all involved copyright holders, typically the developers, to a changed license is required. While in the free and open-source domain achieving 100% coverage of all authors is often impossible due to the many contributors involved, often it is assumed that a great majority is sufficient. For instance, Mozilla assumed an author coverage of 95% to be sufficient.
Since when changing the license of software you need to request sign-off from all the Copyright holders, the CLA granting a perpetual copyright license allowed for unilateral change to be made to the project's software license.
As OpenTofu is going to be under the Linux Foundation's umbrella (where most projects seem to use EasyCLA) and there's already been mention of a potential new CLA I'm asking here if that is in fact the intention going forward.
If that is the case I'd be curious to understand why this decision was taken when the lesson here seems to me that "the community" at large can not trust promises of good will when faced with the reality of possible unilateral re-licensing.
I'm no lawyer but the LF CLA doesn't seem materially different to the Hashicorp one
https://github.com/cncf/cla/blob/master/individual-cla.pdf
https://www.hashicorp.com/cla
https://opensource.com/article/19/2/cla-problems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_relicensing