We understand there is a swirl of allegations about AiB’s practices with respect to former contractors and ex-employees, as well as with respect to open source. The main (false) claim is that AiB is using unethical contract terms to prevent a past core contributor from forking the Ignite CLI software which is published under the Apache 2.0 license. These allegations are false, but AiB is choosing not to engage in the details on this issue at this time—we will provide more details on this situation at the appropriate time.
What we can say now is that we have not denied anyone's request for a waiver agreement.
Goodwill is the most important component of an open-source project (besides the code), but goodwill is subject to public opinion and vulnerable to public disparagement campaigns, especially by contributors previously hired by the company for the project. Core contributors hired by a company are not only paid to work on that specific project, but they also have a unique ability to transfer goodwill through their association (or proprietary information) with the project more so than independent third parties.
Attribution in the source code of any derivative works that are distributed, copyrighted, patented, or trademarked, as per the terms of Apache 2.0 (or *GPL), isn’t enough to protect against disinformation and disparagement campaigns that can erase the history of a project. Stronger attribution terms help, such as requiring an explicit fork on GitHub to make the original project known. Similarly, requiring a prominent link back to the original project in the fork’s README file on GitHub enhances the basic terms of the Apache 2.0 license to ensure that the existence of the original project is well communicated.
Such additional strong attribution terms help highlight the existence of the original project, yet that hard-to-earn-and-easily-swayed goodwill is still vulnerable to disinformation and disparagement. Non-defamation and non-disparagement clauses can help against cases where public disparagement campaigns are used to steal goodwill at the expense of the sponsor and owner of an open-source project.
However, even with strong attribution and non-defamation/disparagement clauses, goodwill can be transferred through other means. To illustrate, there is a further misunderstanding about the current status of Ignite CLI and rumors about AiB withdrawing funding from the Ignite CLI project. This is not the case. AiB is continuing the funding and development of Ignite CLI by core contributors who have worked on the project since its inception and who have committed the overwhelming majority of its code. (This can be transparently reviewed on GitHub.) As another example, an Ignite CLI fork may advertise our previous work as their own, merely swapping “Ignite CLI” for another name and claiming responsibility for work that was only made possible by the contribution of many others under the brand “Ignite CLI” (which had no community pool funding, no venture funds, and was entirely AiB-funded). You can see the contributors here and here and Ignite branded events here and here for some examples.
Despite the issues mentioned above, a good open-source software company must balance the need for core contributors to continue their line of work and execute their vision while also protecting the interests of the company whose funding made the project possible in the first place. AiB has and always will be champions of open-source software, protecting the rights of creators, architects, and core contributors, and ensuring best practices for decentralized ecosystem development in a way that balances the dual mission of producing social goods while also being sustainable and secure.
We will continue to create open-source products and find reasonable ways to manage the public disparagement campaigns that have been affecting us for years. These types of situations have sadly become inevitable for projects that challenge the status quo. We urge all Cosmonauts to learn from our experiences and to share their own, so that we can defend the truth together.