I don't think this is true -- a license's virality doesn't mean that its copyright holders can't switch a future version to a proprietary license; past grants don't imply grants to future work under any open source license.

Correct; however, without a CLA and assuming there are outside contributors, relicensing the existing code would be mildly painful, if not downright impossible.

You're saying that would be more painful in a viral license setting, right? If so I agree, although I think there's a pretty long track record of financially incentivized companies being willing to take that pain. MongoDB's AGPL transition comes to mind.

But, to refocus on the case at hand: Astral's tools don't require contributors to sign a CLA. I understand (and am sympathetic) to the suspicion here, but the bigger picture here is that Astral wants to build services as a product, rather than compromising the open source nature of its tools. That's why the announcement tries to cleanly differentiate between the two.

Yeah, only the (viral license + no CLA) combo has this effect of preventing you from changing license down the road. In your case (permissive license, no CLA) you still can relicense uv or Ruff. Not saying that you will do it, of course :-)

I do like your strategy, hope it works out!

They have no need to, current repos show everything is under MIT/Apache. They could close the source at any time and not worry about CLA.

>bigger picture here is that Astral wants to build services as a product

What services? pyx? Looks nice but I doubt my boss is going to pay for it. More likely they just say "Whatever, package is in PyPi, use that."

UV, Ruff, Ty. Again, maybe they can get some data/quant firm who REALLY cares about speed to use their products. Everyone else will emit a long sigh, grab pip/poetry, black and mypy and move on.

It ultimately depends on a company's risk appetite.

Some companies specify that packages need to be hosted on their internal repository/artifactory, and for these companies, pyx might be a good tool.

Exactly, allowing employees to install pypi packages from the internet isn't different to allowing them to install any software from the internet.

> I think there's a pretty long track record of financially incentivized companies being willing to take that pain. MongoDB's AGPL transition comes to mind.

MongoDB had a CLA from the start, didn't it?

> Astral's tools don't require contributors to sign a CLA.

That's a pretty vital difference!

>> Astral's tools don't require contributors to sign a CLA.

> That's a pretty vital difference

Not really when the license is MIT/Apache. They can create a closed source fork and continue development there.

Ah yeah, whoops. Either a CLA or permissive license is enough on its own to facilitate such a license change.

yeah? who's going to court for multiple years to fight giants? Maybe they'll pull a RedHat and put the code behind a subscription service. Still OSS right?

By viral, do you mean licenses like GPL that force those who have modified the code to release their changes (if they're distributing binaries that include those changes)?

Because FWIW CPython is not GPL. They have their own license but do not require modifications to be made public.

This is just plain false and honestly close-minded. People choose permissive licenses for all sorts of reasons. Some might want to close it off later, but lots of people prefer the non-viral nature of permissive licenses, because it doesn't constrain others' license choice in the future. Still others think that permissive licenses are more free than copyleft, and choose them for that reason. Please don't just accuse vast groups of people of being bad-faith actors just because you disagree with their license choice.

I think you are making a good point, but please don't use the old Steve Baller FUD term, "viral." Copyleft is a better term

I don't think the connotation these days is particular negative, in the sense it's being used here. See, e.g., "viral video".

Politics aside, "copyleft" originates from a pun and is hardly self-explanatory, whereas "viral" is.

Every word is charged now, so you might as well use it. "Copyleft" is a fine pun on "copyright".

Careful, or you'll get the copyleftists calling you a neo-libre-al.