[mbrukman]

Sorry for not making it more clear; I was responding to the statement:

> Not really open. If you submit code, you grant a license to Google to use it in non-proprietary code.[1] So, at some point, once users and developers are locked in, Google can make later versions closed and proprietary enough to stop clones.

The CLA does not change anything about the license, and does not prevent or make it possible (or easier) to make proprietary versions of the software (or your contributions) — all those conditions are in the license itself, the CLA does not override or amend any terms of the license.

In other words, you can make the same argument about any Apache, BSD, or MIT software, while the poster is claiming that it's the CLA that enables making future releases proprietary, which is why I pointed out that the Google CLA is the same as the ASF CLA.

If the argument is that Apache/BSD/MIT licenses are "not really open" because they allow incorporating them into proprietary software without releasing code, that's a different argument and is really a distinction between the "permissive" licenses like Apache/BSD/MIT and the "copyleft" licenses like GPL, but again, that has nothing to do with the CLA.

[ColanR]

That's a very fair point. Thanks for clarifying.