EDIT: The Fluxer dev responded over on Reddit that they will remove the CLA before opening the repository to contributions due to how successful the funding campaign has been. This is a huge win for the community being able to trust that Fluxer will be community-owned forever. My warning now thankfully no longer applies! Huzzah!
Original post:
I was quite hopeful for Fluxer due to the developer committing to making it Federated and eventually offering encryption. But most importantly, it uses the aGPLv3 license, which ensures that corporations can't take it from us in the future.
However, it came to my attention that Fluxer requires coders to sign a Contributor CLA agreement to contribute any code to the project.
Finally, we can offer commercial licences to companies that want to run Fluxer internally without being bound by the AGPLv3 copyleft terms. This is enabled via a contributor-friendly CLA, but it doesn't create a separate "enterprise edition". It's still the same Fluxer software everyone else uses.
The CLA itself in the docs:
CLA (required)
We require a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) for this repository.
Why:
- The project is available under AGPLv3.
- We also offer a commercial license for organizations that cannot (or do not want to) comply with AGPL obligations.
- To keep both options possible, we need permission to include contributions in both distributions.
What it means for you:
- You keep ownership of your contribution.
- You can keep using your contribution in your own work.
- You grant us the rights needed to distribute your contribution as part of the project, including under a commercial license.
- We may refactor or remove code over time and are not required to include every contribution. However, any distributed version that includes your contribution remains properly licensed under the project license(s) that applied when you contributed.
How to sign:
- On your first PR, a bot will comment with a CLA link.
- Click it, sign with your GitHub account, and you are done.
The critical part here is: "You grant us the rights needed to distribute your contribution as part of the project, including under a commercial license."
That's a little ambiguous, but if I'm understanding it correctly, granting them the ability to package your code in a commercial license means legally, the company itself could just cease its own contributions to the GPL version of Fluxer in the future (after it's already become established and successfully replaced Discord), and instead simply focus on a commercial, proprietary version of Fluxer which they can then completely control to sell and exploit as they wish.
Per the Drew Devault article on CLAs:
This is a strategy employed by commercial companies with one purpose only: to place a rug under the project, so that they can pull at the first sign of a bad quarter. This strategy exists to subvert the open source social contract. These companies wish to enjoy the market appeal of open source and the free labor of their community to improve their product, but do not want to secure these contributors any rights over their work.
Point is; all CLAs are bad
IMHO, unless the Contributor CLA is entirely removed, I'd strongly suggest passing on Fluxer for something that doesn't have a CLA, and thus be guaranteed to be safely community-owned forever, such as Movim.
This effects end-users just as much as it effects contributors.
The CLA essentially provides a lever that can be pulled at any time to convert Fluxer into a closed-source proprietary app no different from Discord, which also enables it to be sold to venture capital, providing all the same incentives to enshittify the the app that Discord had, such as collaborating with Palantir-like entities for profit.
That would easily put us right back into the same boat we're in right now. We would be absolute fools to knowingly walk into that trap when we're so desperate to leave the one we're already in.
Fluxer with a CLA is kicking the can down the road.
It can also be forked at any time. Can't say the same for Discord.
That's not a complete get 'out of jail free' card: https://lemmy.cafe/post/31748570/15981308
It's a calculated risk to support Fluxer with a CLA. It might work out down the road if the last GPL version is forked, but it could just as easily not work out.
The best solution is to push for the Fluxer dev to remove the CLA, so we can safely support him and the project.
Wasn't suggesting it was. Just that it's the best option we currently have.
The best option is to push for the Fluxer dev to remove the CLA, so we can safely support him and the project. Otherwise, we can simply adopt a different piece of software that doesn't have a CLA. Funding the Movim dev, as an example, would help accelerate the development of the few missing Discord-like features. That would let us have our cake and eat it too.
Sticking with CLA software and hoping for the best is not a good long-term plan.