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:
Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA)
Meh, a permissive license + a copyright transfer means this shit is just a potential rugpull. MSFT can change the license of the project to source-available or even proprietary at any time and you’ll be powerless to stop it.
Sure. Let’s make sure that people know what this really means though.
Microsoft cannot “undo” the current license. If such a “rug pull” happens in the future, we all retain access to the code that exists at that time including all contributions from Microsoft. We can also all continue to not only use it but contribute to it under an Open Source license and keep it a vibrant, useful project if we want. Microsoft is powerless to stop us. We could fork it then or even now without the copyright assignment requirement. We have that freedom.
What the “rug pull” allows Microsoft to do is to decide, in the future, to change their policy and to make further changes themselves and not give us access to those future changes. They have that freedom.
Again, even if Microsoft did this, we could fork and carry-on. Look at Valkey and Reddis as an example.
So, the situation is that Microsoft is Open Sourcing a bunch of work that they did. The maximum possible downside is that they could stop giving us even more in the future. Our reaction is “meh”.
What concerns us is not that Microsoft can take away our freedom. They cannot. What upsets us is that they may retain or receive freedom we do not want them to have.
That is all fine. We are all allowed to think about it as we like and I guess we al value “freedom” in different ways. Sometimes though I think people misunderstand and think somehow that all the code could be “taken back”’. It cannot. Similarly, we might worry that our freedom (even the 4 freedoms) could be lost. For this code, that is not the case.
CLA is basically a requirement for any larger scale open source project. It would be mental to add a “this single edited line is licensed under X license” to every tiny commit. Microsoft’s CLA does not tranfer rights btw, it just licenses your contribution to M$ under “basically BSD 0 clause license” terms.
I guess sure they could do a ragpull but it does not make much sense. Reasons:
they have open sourced it themselves
It’s made by M$ for M$. They don’t have competition in the Windows space, so there is no point to hide the code.
Also what would be the worst thing that could happen if they did that? You would either use a fork, because WSL2 is basically feature complete at this points, or you would be have to use a proprietary app on a proprietary OS. Imo the licensing of WSL specifically is the least of Windows’ issues.
You absolutely do not need a CLA with a copyright transfer. There are plenty of large projects that use a Developer Certificate of Origin that protects the company while not allowing them to change the license of your contribution.
I’ll grant that my original post was pissy and angry and not a great take, however. You make good points here.
Does the DCO really offer a real guarantee? it looks like it just adds a Signed-off-by John line at the end of the commit, with no actual signature checking that enforces any particular version of a particular document is being acknowledged. IANAL but it doesn’t look like something proven to work in court to give legal protection.
Sure, it’s easier to simply add a sign-off-by line than actually accepting a legal agreement, so it reduces the barrier of entry, but if this were really enough to establish the conditions to shift liability then I don’t see why companies wouldn’t start using their own DCOs and extending them, essentially just being a more convenient CLA (which is a license agreement, not a copyright transfer, even if some might add terms that allow relicensing… which anyway is already possible given the project is already MIT licensed).
CLA and copyright assignment are different things. In some jurisdictions copyright assignment is impossible. That was among the clashes European FOSS contributors had with the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallmann in the 1990s and 2000s.
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.
From the repo’s CONTRIBUTING.md:
Meh, a permissive license + a copyright transfer means this shit is just a potential rugpull. MSFT can change the license of the project to source-available or even proprietary at any time and you’ll be powerless to stop it.
Sure. Let’s make sure that people know what this really means though.
Microsoft cannot “undo” the current license. If such a “rug pull” happens in the future, we all retain access to the code that exists at that time including all contributions from Microsoft. We can also all continue to not only use it but contribute to it under an Open Source license and keep it a vibrant, useful project if we want. Microsoft is powerless to stop us. We could fork it then or even now without the copyright assignment requirement. We have that freedom.
What the “rug pull” allows Microsoft to do is to decide, in the future, to change their policy and to make further changes themselves and not give us access to those future changes. They have that freedom.
Again, even if Microsoft did this, we could fork and carry-on. Look at Valkey and Reddis as an example.
So, the situation is that Microsoft is Open Sourcing a bunch of work that they did. The maximum possible downside is that they could stop giving us even more in the future. Our reaction is “meh”.
What concerns us is not that Microsoft can take away our freedom. They cannot. What upsets us is that they may retain or receive freedom we do not want them to have.
That is all fine. We are all allowed to think about it as we like and I guess we al value “freedom” in different ways. Sometimes though I think people misunderstand and think somehow that all the code could be “taken back”’. It cannot. Similarly, we might worry that our freedom (even the 4 freedoms) could be lost. For this code, that is not the case.
CLA is basically a requirement for any larger scale open source project. It would be mental to add a “this single edited line is licensed under X license” to every tiny commit. Microsoft’s CLA does not tranfer rights btw, it just licenses your contribution to M$ under “basically BSD 0 clause license” terms.
I guess sure they could do a ragpull but it does not make much sense. Reasons:
they have open sourced it themselves
It’s made by M$ for M$. They don’t have competition in the Windows space, so there is no point to hide the code.
Also what would be the worst thing that could happen if they did that? You would either use a fork, because WSL2 is basically feature complete at this points, or you would be have to use a proprietary app on a proprietary OS. Imo the licensing of WSL specifically is the least of Windows’ issues.
You absolutely do not need a CLA with a copyright transfer. There are plenty of large projects that use a Developer Certificate of Origin that protects the company while not allowing them to change the license of your contribution.
I’ll grant that my original post was pissy and angry and not a great take, however. You make good points here.
Does the DCO really offer a real guarantee? it looks like it just adds a
Signed-off-by Johnline at the end of the commit, with no actual signature checking that enforces any particular version of a particular document is being acknowledged. IANAL but it doesn’t look like something proven to work in court to give legal protection.Sure, it’s easier to simply add a sign-off-by line than actually accepting a legal agreement, so it reduces the barrier of entry, but if this were really enough to establish the conditions to shift liability then I don’t see why companies wouldn’t start using their own DCOs and extending them, essentially just being a more convenient CLA (which is a license agreement, not a copyright transfer, even if some might add terms that allow relicensing… which anyway is already possible given the project is already MIT licensed).
CLA and copyright assignment are different things. In some jurisdictions copyright assignment is impossible. That was among the clashes European FOSS contributors had with the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallmann in the 1990s and 2000s.
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.
You should still be able to fork, right? Under a non copyrighted name (see: firefox to icecat)
Yes.
There are two downsides if Microsoft takes it proprietary again in the future.
we would have to fork it and maintain the fork. Honestly, what kind of “community” are we if this is what we are complaining about?
Microsoft could include out contributions in their future commercial product.
Again, Microsoft cannot take away access to our own code. They just get to use it. That “freedom” really pisses some people off.