Contributor License Agreement really needed?

The agreement and the license are two different things, aren't they?

A Contributor License Agreement can be handy if you want to switch licenses at a later point. I don't get why you want to get rid of that.

@diaspeu can you check which libraries the Diaspora code uses at the moment? And you have to find every single person that contributed code. This is not a community decision.

I'm not sure if we really need it or not. The CLA was originally intended by Diaspora Inc to say "Hey, we're going to keep our code Free Software, but we reserve the right to publish small parts of the code under the MIT license, because that's what the Rails community mostly uses, and if we make some improvement that all the Rails community can benefit from, then we're going to do it under their license, but we won't disrupt our promise of following the AGPL for Diaspora's codebase."

But seeing as we're a community project now, I'm not sure whether that's applicable.

We should separate the source code from Diaspora Inc.

I wouldn't vote for switching to MIT-style license

What is the problem we're trying to solve by having two licenses? Even if we were to contribute code back to Rails, or expose something in a RubyGem someday, couldn't we release that under a separate project and license it as MIT? I see no reason for the dual license complexity, it just confuses new contributors.

Basically, I want a license that will prevent companies from forking the codebase and somehow making it proprietary. As long as you make the source code public AND you maintain the Federation Protocol, you should be able to fork Diaspora and do whatever you want.

Relicensing is pain in the ass. I would propose we just leave it as it is. AGPL wouldn't be my first choice of license, but neither ist MIT. Copyleft is a great momentum of success for open source code. But it could make sense to dual-license special parts like the federation layer with MIT, so that it can be used for proprietary software.

Remember that we haven't ever contributed anything back to Rails. All of this bullshit is just preventative measures.