Today we’re very excited to announce the open-source release of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this, and a great closure to the first ever issue raised on the Microsoft/WSL repo:
You’re correct, but I don’t believe that a company shouldn’t be allowed to take my code and change its license in the future. If they want to take something proprietary, they can go ahead and remove my contribution from it first.
If you want to enforce that, you need to fork it and put a copyleft license on it. This is very rarely done because it’s more work to maintain software than to write it…
Hence my initial whinging about how this was released with a permissive license and a copyright transfer. The longer I’m involved in this industry, the less I like permissive software licensing. There’s obviously a place for it, but my tolerance for permissive licensing is directly tied to my trust for the person or organization backing the software. I don’t trust Microsoft, and I don’t think I will ever personally contribute to their software unless my contribution is made under a copyleft license and with a DCO, not a copyright-transferring CLA.
They can change future versions to that, not already released ones.
You’re correct, but I don’t believe that a company shouldn’t be allowed to take my code and change its license in the future. If they want to take something proprietary, they can go ahead and remove my contribution from it first.
MIT license already allows this, with or without CLA.
That’s why you can also take Microsoft’s MIT code and make proprietary software out of it.
If you want to enforce that, you need to fork it and put a copyleft license on it. This is very rarely done because it’s more work to maintain software than to write it…
Hence my initial whinging about how this was released with a permissive license and a copyright transfer. The longer I’m involved in this industry, the less I like permissive software licensing. There’s obviously a place for it, but my tolerance for permissive licensing is directly tied to my trust for the person or organization backing the software. I don’t trust Microsoft, and I don’t think I will ever personally contribute to their software unless my contribution is made under a copyleft license and with a DCO, not a copyright-transferring CLA.