But that’s just not true. I think you’re confusing this with some source-available licenses or these silly amendmends to licenses that make it defacto proprietary. But this isn’t the case here. This statement in the CLA doesn’t take away any rights. It gives additional ones. And it’s in addition to the AGPL. All of the AGPL applies in addition to the CLA. Every single freedom, just as if the CLA weren’t there. You can use it, modify it, copy it, etc…

The “around a decade” of course applies. And none of that has to do with the signing away copyright per CLA. You also don’t know if Linus Torvalds is around in 5 years and keeps maintaining the kernel to your liking. You also don’t know if any of the big open source projects of today get bought by some shady investors and the next updates won’t be free software anymore… These things happen. And it has little to do with a CLA (like this one). Happens to plain standard licenses without extras, too. And it does to ones with this kind of licensing. But this really isn’t the distinguishing factor.

I think what you mean is modified licenses. Or similar additions that render something not open source anymore. I agree, you should avoid those projects at all costs. But that’s a different story and not what this project is doing.

My point is a different one: While focusing on some small details of a hypothetical case that I think you got partly wrong… Have you checked for any big elephants in the room? Because I don’t see anyone talking about the database / search index and whether that’s available. The website is just a very small part and just the frontend to query the database. I’d say it’s almost pointless to discuss what we’re arguing about. I can code a search frontend website in a week, that’s not the point. And completely irrelevant if it’s open source… What about the data that powers the search engine? I think that’d be the correct question to ask. Not whether the frontend is 99% or 110% open source.