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I don't see how a CLA materially affects this possibility, though. If my company sponsors a BSD-licensed open source project without enforcing a CLA and then decides that starting with the next major version, we're taking it closed source, the exact same thing you describe is just as likely to happen as with a CLA -- the deciding factor seems to me to be whether most of the development activity happening on the codebase is community-driven or driven by paid developers at the company. Conversely, if the community is active and doing a lot of major work already, and there are enough non-company developers with the time, interest, and skill to start and sustain a fork, they're going to do that with or without a CLA.



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