For many contributors, they're ok giving full ownership of their contributions to a project owner on the owner's terms. Some contributors may not be ok with that of course, but it doesn't mean that every project owner has nefarious plans with said code ownership.
And that's why "open source" is a really bad term that no one should use unironically, unless they want to confuse the hell out of people.
There are protective (copyleft) licenses, and there are permissive licenses - and they're very different beasts. And it's, like, software licensing 101.
> that want to go from LGPL to MIT or something
I find this extremely weird.
In a sane world, picking a copyleft license must mean that you care about user freedoms and want to make sure they're respected no matter what happens. Because that's the whole point of picking a copyleft license - not about letting people peek or tweak some code, not about social brownie points, and most certainly not about marketing campaigns - but about granting users their freedoms.
Either people get confused about "open source" and pick... I don't know, whatever looks cool, without even understanding what they're doing; or they're giving up on their principles when they smell the money.
I can understand wanting to go from, say, GPL to AGPL, or GPLv2 to GPLv3[+] - it would make sense, as it all goes in line of protecting freedoms. But LGPL to MIT is truly a weird one.
Copyleft licenses were the default choice at some point in time, but then in the '10s most big projects seemed to pick a permissive license, and many switched.
However, I thought about it and I think I can get the cases where monetary opportunities started to outweigh what's essentially are political ideals. Happens all the time, heh. I guess I can imagine person not being honest with themselves until the temptation really comes. Especially if it's about casual developers trying to have some money to live comfortably (as opposed to lowering their standards of living), rather than getting rich.
I can only hope it's that and not a simple ignorance.
This is a personal bias and disregards others' definition of true do-whatever-you-want freedom. Different project owners may think differently on what free means and alter the license to respect their principles (and may consider copyleft to be the restrictive/anti-free mistake made early on based on these same kinds of personal biases).
And many contributors don't really care what the project owner does with their code and the CLA lets them delegate responsibility.
People who value attention over principles are known as "pick mes" apparently.
unless the corp owns the rights, they cannot "close it", nor take away everyone else's freedom. The old version that was open source licensed is always going to be available.
Unless you're talking about the additions these corporations made, which they keep closed, and charge you for it. But if they are able to charge for it, they deserve it.
Someone who is has a strong preference for copyleft licences may not want to contribute to a project with a permissive license.
The intent may not be for the project owners to use the code in proprietary software, but it would be to allow someone to do so.
However that would also mean that the core project couldn't accept your changes without the CLA since that would also bind them to never switching the license or relicensing your contributions for an enterprise license.
... I think. My head hurts when trying to consider the implications for CLAs and AGPL and the endless debates that lawyers could have over this.
