[Macha]

The copyright for Minio consists of:

- Code written by the Minio team, which they have full ownership of and can relicense as they wish

- Code written by third party contributors, where Minio required the contributors to provide Minio a BSD license to use the contributions but only published it to other people under AGPL.

So the AGPL doesn't bind Minio themselves because of their licensing policy. (Which is why while pure AGPL might be the open source maximalist license, AGPL + CLA is almost at the opposite end of the scale)

[rzerowan]

Question , can MinIO the company assert AGPL copyright against the fork - i see in the writeup they mentioned trademarks as far as the fork is concerned.

Whats the situation for a AGPL fork , were one to use it can the company assert rights like they did to Nutanix.

[Macha]

As long as the fork complies with the terms of the AGPL, Minio can't stop them from using the code. As the article acknowledge,s hey could potentially rely on trademarks to make them rename it.

[patmorgan23]

Doesn't that depend on the CLA?

Could you not have a CLA that only allows the project to use a specific license?

[Macha]

You could, but the reason that companies ask for CLAs is to free themselves by that restriction.

If Minio just wanted to use the changes under AGPL, the contributor could just license them under AGPL, no CLA needed.

[throawayonthe]

the FSF position is that GPL is unenforceable without a single copyright owner, which is why almost all gnu projects, linux, canonical/redhat/etc projects have a CLA or something functionally similar

[Macha]

That would seem a bizarre position from the FSF, since it would make the license on combined GPL works unenforceable. Do you have a source for that?

[phoronixrly]

Was going to mention the CLA. Each time you sign a CLA you're doing free work. Never do that. Keep and maintain your patches locally instead.

[bigfatkitten]

Sometimes that’s far more work than it’ll ever be worth.

If I get my patches upstream, then I don’t have to waste time reintegrating patches and rebuilding packages when I could instead be doing productive things.