Hello everyone. So a while ago I stumbled upon Shopify's Polaris, which is a React UI framework. It seemed like a nice project overall, and while I appreciate it being an open source project (they didn't have to do that), it has a weird licence which is basically a modified version of the MIT licence but with a clause that prevents competitive usage.<p>Now, the other interesting bit is that the project also has a Contributor Licence Agreement (CLA) which also seems to provide all copyright to Shopify. I don't really understand how these legal stuff work in software, but I heard that CLAs have been used in the past to profit off contributors by moving to another proprietary licence (MongoDB and Elastisearch did that)<p>Then do you (developers on HN) stay away from CLAs? It doesn't sound too risky for me, and I've probably listened to one too many open source activists.<p>Another question, if I may, would it be possible to relicense a fork of Polaris to MIT (removing the Shopify clause?)
> <i>Then do you (developers on HN) stay away from CLAs?</i><p>Depends on the CLA, but generally I do stay away. E.g. I never checked in anything to the official Qt repository because I don't agree the the CLA by QTC. Instead I finally made my own fork and call it LeanQt and LeanCreator (see <a href="https://github.com/rochus-keller/leanqt/">https://github.com/rochus-keller/leanqt/</a> and <a href="https://github.com/rochus-keller/leancreator/">https://github.com/rochus-keller/leancreator/</a>).<p>The "weird licence which is basically a modified version of the MIT licence but with a clause that prevents competitive usage" is likely not even recognized as a true "open source" license.<p>> <i>would it be possible to relicense a fork of Polaris to MIT (removing the Shopify clause?)</i><p>Likely not, because only the IP owner can determine who can do what with their IP under what license. If you use the software of an IP owner under a specific licence, you usually don't have the rights to re-license their work, even if you modified it.