EDIT: The Fluxer dev responded over on Reddit that they will remove the CLA before opening the repository to contributions due to how successful the funding campaign has been. This is a huge win for the community being able to trust that Fluxer will be community-owned forever. My warning now thankfully no longer applies! Huzzah!
Original post:
I was quite hopeful for Fluxer due to the developer committing to making it Federated and eventually offering encryption. But most importantly, it uses the aGPLv3 license, which ensures that corporations can’t take it from us in the future.
However, it came to my attention that Fluxer requires coders to sign a Contributor CLA agreement to contribute any code to the project.
Finally, we can offer commercial licences to companies that want to run Fluxer internally without being bound by the AGPLv3 copyleft terms. This is enabled via a contributor-friendly CLA, but it doesn’t create a separate “enterprise edition”. It’s still the same Fluxer software everyone else uses.
The CLA itself in the docs:
CLA (required)
We require a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) for this repository.
Why:
- The project is available under AGPLv3.
- We also offer a commercial license for organizations that cannot (or do not want to) comply with AGPL obligations.
- To keep both options possible, we need permission to include contributions in both distributions.
What it means for you:
- You keep ownership of your contribution.
- You can keep using your contribution in your own work.
- You grant us the rights needed to distribute your contribution as part of the project, including under a commercial license.
- We may refactor or remove code over time and are not required to include every contribution. However, any distributed version that includes your contribution remains properly licensed under the project license(s) that applied when you contributed.
How to sign:
- On your first PR, a bot will comment with a CLA link.
- Click it, sign with your GitHub account, and you are done.
The critical part here is: “You grant us the rights needed to distribute your contribution as part of the project, including under a commercial license.”
That’s a little ambiguous, but if I’m understanding it correctly, granting them the ability to package your code in a commercial license means legally, the company itself could just cease its own contributions to the GPL version of Fluxer in the future (after it’s already become established and successfully replaced Discord), and instead simply focus on a commercial, proprietary version of Fluxer which they can then completely control to sell and exploit as they wish.
Per the Drew Devault article on CLAs:
This is a strategy employed by commercial companies with one purpose only: to place a rug under the project, so that they can pull at the first sign of a bad quarter. This strategy exists to subvert the open source social contract. These companies wish to enjoy the market appeal of open source and the free labor of their community to improve their product, but do not want to secure these contributors any rights over their work.
Point is; all CLAs are bad
IMHO, unless the Contributor CLA is entirely removed, I’d strongly suggest passing on Fluxer for something that doesn’t have a CLA, and thus be guaranteed to be safely community-owned forever, such as Movim.
Not ideal, but they can never paywall your agpl code and all agpl instances must provide source code so it will be obvious who is running the non agpl licensed codebase.
I do think the cla is a mistake, but I’m not worried about losing access to contributions.
They can’t retroactively close-source the older versions released under AGPL, but if it ever required a community fork to continue the last release of the GPL version, it would be a massive burden to maintain it, and could cause federation to break as the codebase diverges over time, which would create a rift in the community. You’d also have to hope that average users care enough about the license to jump ship to the GPL (probably now not as full-featured) version, otherwise the GPL version risks not being able to get enough funding to continue, or enough users to convince the larger communities to move over.
As a somewhat similar real world example, the pixel-art program Aseprite once used a FLOSS license, but it switched to a proprietary license at some point. The last GPL version was forked by the community, but it never got much traction, and is now massively behind the closed source version in features and userbase.
It’s a pretty huge potential liability down the road. We can ignore it for the sake of convenience, but it really could bite us in the ass. Now is the best time to avoid entrenching ourselves with it.
I also want to stress that if this issue gains momentum in the community, the dev might actually be willing to take it out. If we just go along with the flow, it will not be removed.
Movim simply does not seem to be a Discord equivalent.
It is currently missing a couple features, such as channels with rooms, but the developer is actively implementing those, after which it would be pretty much 1:1 in functionality.
It currently has the ability to Chat, send images/videos in chat, do group audio/video calls, and screenshare applications with audio (but currently requires a chromium based browser to share the audio).
Well fair enough but so far it seems to function nothing like it until that stuff is bought in.
It currently has the ability to Chat/call 1 on 1, create public facing group chats, send images/videos/files in chat, perform group audio/video calls, and screenshare applications with audio (but currently requires a chromium based browser to share the audio). I believe that’s most of Discord’s functionality, it even looks like Discord. Once the spaces and audio rooms are implemented, it’ll be virtually a complete clone.
Ping me when its done. Honestly. I’m already sitting in too many discord alternatives waiting for a positive move.
Very insightful observation and post, thank you very much for that.
This does seem to be a problem, and if fluxer pulls the rug on us, I’ll burn this community to the ground (lol ok not literally, maybe I’d be cool to keep the post history). Feel free to make posts calling people to pressure the fluxer developer, I’d support this initiative 100%.
I noticed that movim has an abandoned lemmy community: !movim@lemmy.ml. If you’d like, you could become a mod on this community (maybe the lemmy.ml admins can help you with that), you seem very passionate about this project. You can even promote the movim community on !newcommunities@lemmy.world and !communitypromo@lemmy.ca.
(alt of Prodigalfrog here btw, I can’t respond in this thread with my main account, as Slrpnk was down for a few days and it’s still catching up with lemmy.world).
If I were to mod a Movim comm, I’d probably create one on Slrpnk or a generic instance.
Probably a good idea to have one around at some point though!
And thanks for being onboard with getting the CLA dropped ^^
You’re welcome!
Probably a good idea to have one around at some point though!
Yeah. Let me know if you create one, I can configure my bot @steam_lover@sh.itjust.works to fetch any rss feed they might have and post on the movim community.
Very surprising and welcome update: The Fluxer dev responded to a similar thread on reddit that they will remove the CLA before opening the repo to contributions due to how successful the funding campaign has been. Fluxer is now back on the table! :)
Though I may still open a Movim community as well, just in case.
Wow, that’s amazing. Could you make a new post when he removes the CLA? I can post it too, but if you catch it before me, feel free.
EDIT: nvm, just saw that you updated the title.
Sure thing 👍
I believe it’s been removed? This is the refactor contributor docs, changed 6hrs ago: https://github.com/fluxerapp/fluxer/blob/refactor/CONTRIBUTING.md
That’s great news, the dev seemed like a good guy from what I’ve seen so far so I’m not surprised. Really hope it keeps taking off.
I think this is more of a “don’t contribute code” rather than a “don’t use this”.
This effects end-users just as much as it effects contributors.
The CLA essentially provides a lever that can be pulled at any time to convert Fluxer into a closed-source proprietary app no different from Discord, which also enables it to be sold to venture capital, providing all the same incentives to enshittify the the app that Discord had, such as collaborating with Palantir-like entities for profit.
That would easily put us right back into the same boat we’re in right now. We would be absolute fools to knowingly walk into that trap when we’re so desperate to leave the one we’re already in.
Fluxer with a CLA is kicking the can down the road.
It can also be forked at any time. Can’t say the same for Discord.
That’s not a complete get ‘out of jail free’ card: https://lemmy.cafe/post/31748570/15981308
It’s a calculated risk to support Fluxer with a CLA. It might work out down the road if the last GPL version is forked, but it could just as easily not work out.
The best solution is to push for the Fluxer dev to remove the CLA, so we can safely support him and the project.
Wasn’t suggesting it was. Just that it’s the best option we currently have.
The best option is to push for the Fluxer dev to remove the CLA, so we can safely support him and the project. Otherwise, we can simply adopt a different piece of software that doesn’t have a CLA. Funding the Movim dev, as an example, would help accelerate the development of the few missing Discord-like features. That would let us have our cake and eat it too.
Sticking with CLA software and hoping for the best is not a good long-term plan.
It’s definitely more profit motivated in comparison to some of the other Discord alternatives I’ve been looking into.
Fluxer has pay wall structures for things similarly to Discord’s Nitro, called Plutonium on Fluxer, even being able to gift it (which I associate with child grooming due to the nature of predators utilizing Nitro as bait; not Fluxer’s fault, but I do).
They’re a little ahead in some ways in comparison to Stoat.Chat, but this monetary structure to Fluxer just gives me a weird feelings.
They are, but they do seem to be going for a federated structure.
Stoat.chat I can see imploding due to being outrun by Root and possibly Fluxer, and being on a very slow development cycle.
Sigh another one. Another platform I’ve not heard of but have to look into now. Let me jot that down… Root.
Root is VC funded and spiritual heir to Guilded. I would advise not to. I just mean that Root is competing more directly with Stoat here, but they have money and development speed.
I appreciate you sparing me the research. You’re right though; it truly is an arms race.
