Essentially, you should consider any AGPL+CLA project as "source available", not as a true open source project where everyone's contributions are equal.

Of course, at least it's possible to fork since the base license is AGPL.

@lina why is that an "at least"? That a very serious codebase is currently available and no one can take it away is immensely valuable. Owners being able to also use it under any license always seemed like the expectation to me, and seemed reasonable.

I've literally spent over a decade in FOSS before even understanding that e.g. GPL-without-CLA was forbidding that!

@valpackett The point of licenses like the GPL is that *everyone* has the same rights. "Owners" are not special, so they can't rugpull or take advantage of contributors. This is what enables equal forks.

If you fork an AGPL+CLA project, you can't have a CLA any more because the fork does not inherit the special privileges of the original owner. The CLA permanently enshrines the "original" author as superior to everyone else as long as that repo exists.

As a contributor, my expectation is that if I spend my time to contribute to your project for free, that my contribution will not be later be part of a rugpull where the repo owner flips to a commercial enterprise and stops doing FOSS. If there's a CLA that allows them to do that, I won't contribute in the first place.

If they *want* to be able to do that, then the whole repo should be MIT so *everyone else* gets to do that too. It's only fair.

FOSS projects are all about a group of people contributing under an equal license with equal rights. The original author already has leverage in the form of controlling the original community and repo (making a fork succeed isn't easy), they don't need legal leverage on top of that.