this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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What if Reddit and the government paid billions to the creators to fork over the servers and to make the source code and apps proprietary?
Unlikely considering their source of funding comes from various European governments.
Also, it's not very easy to make open source closed source. The original Lemmy code and documentation is already out there. The only thing they could do would be to add new features that are all closed source. (This is what reddit does, as their old code is open source.) At best, it would be a fork of Lemmy with closed source elements.
It's been established that you can't call backsies on open sourcing your software.
They could make new updates to lemmy proprietary, but what's out there is already out there.
Maybe not even that. Lemmy is released under the AGPL3. This means that modified versions of Lemmy have to also be released as free software under the AGPL3 or a compatible license. To release a derivative work under an incompatible license you would need to own the code or be given permission by each contributor to do so. For any contribution where you can't make a deal with the author, you would have to rip it out of the codebase entirely. Note that this is true for lemmy devs as well. If there is no Contributor License Agreement that states otherwise, they cannot distribute the work of other contributors under an AGPL3-incompatible license.
Right, I was thinking the "collective authors"; and to be fair, a small contribution could be replaced if tracked properly. If there's no CLA and there are a lot of significant contributions by various individuals you're absolutely right that it becomes impractical to the point that it wouldn't happen.