61–70 of 196 posts
CLA intimidates people to contribute. It discourages contributions
Why would people contribute to a project they don't agree to the license of? Isn't it good to discourage contributions from people who don't agree in the first place, avoiding future conflict?
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As they say, not all open source is FOSS... > Free and open source software licenses grant explicit freedoms to three groups: the maintainers, the users, and the contributors. This is not the case of all open source licenses... Wrong. FOSS = Free Open Source Software, which is really redundant, because all Open Source Software is Free Software. Open Source is essentially the marketing branch of Free Software. The Ope…
> because all Open Source Software is Free Software It's exactly the opposite: All Free Software is open source, but not vice versa [1]. [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
I never heard of the “Open Watcom” license before. But if it really does not allow modified copies to run locally then it is violating criteria 1, and 3 of the Open Source Definition. I am surprised the OSI approved it.
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No, but I would be just as upset if I wouldn't have done that contribution. There is no way they can change the past - my contribution is still open source and so is the project up until the version where they introduced the license change. The version I made my contribution to is still BSD but the current upstream master might not be.
Yes, but now that version is quickly becoming stale, growing CVEs and perhaps becoming incompatible with the new upstream, with a community left in disarray that more often than not fails to support a fork.
In my experience, a lot of the projects with large numbers of CVEs also have a rather sprawling project with lots of things that can (and should) be disabled if they don't apply to your environment; most of the CVEs will happen in parts you don't use. (That's clearly not the case for all projects, openssl is a joy to have as a critical dependency, but there are some options now)
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I think the FSF gets a pass here, given that the GPL has explicit protections against the negative behaviors warned about in the article.
Wouldn't your article then more accurately be "Don't sign a CLA without reading it and making sure you agree with what it says", which reduces pretty cleanly to "Don't sign things unless you've read them and agree with them"? Your overall point seems to be one I agree with, which is "CLAs can be (and often are) used to enable maintainers to make decisions that contributors wouldn't want to be made, and contributors s…
Some CLAs are worse than others, though, and as people send me examples of supposedly benine CLAs I've been writing up addendums to add to the bottom of the article. There is indeed some nuance here, which I hope to address in that manner.
It's a great point to be aware of, but the title and the tone implies that you as a contributor should be a FOSS maximalist. As they say, not all open source is FOSS. And some people are OK with that. Let them contribute, as long as they are aware of the implications. When I discover bugs in open-source projects during my day job (which is on a closed-source project), I will be much happier having those fixes merged…
>> Free and open source software licenses grant explicit freedoms to three groups: the maintainers, the users, and the contributors. > This is not the case of all open source licenses. And that is fine. Don't assume all my work has to be part of your crusade. Indeed, I've contributed to one open source project with a CLA, it had an Apache v2 license... So It didn't really seem to make any practical difference to that…
This is often times called a "DCO" — Developer Certificate of Origin. I think that is a better name for these, as the term "CLA" is very much associated with the controversial copyright reassignment/relicensing clauses.
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> I did not say that, nor do I believe it, nor is it really related. What is the practical difference between contributing under a CLA to a project that's currently under an open-source license and contributing under a non-copyleft open-source license while retaining the copyright yourself? In both cases the project's ability to "go closed source" seems substantially the same, so it seems to me that your arguments ag…
The GPL family of licenses certainly provides the strongest guarantees to the contributor. But let's consider a "weak" license like MIT. Here's the text to refresh your memory: https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT If you change the license, all of the original work must still be distributed under MIT and only the work done after the cutover can use a new license. The GPL differs in that the new work must also be licen…
My understanding of MIT and other permissive licenses like it is that if I license that code under the MIT license, I can never "undo" that (for the code as it existed in that moment), even if I own all the copyright to a work myself. So a CLA cannot override the MIT license in that way either.
The "without limitation" part of the MIT license guards against this doesn't it?
Pieter Hintjens makes a similar argument in Social Architecture, describing ZeroMQ's community guidelines: > All patches are owned by their authors. There SHALL NOT be any copyright assignment process. > Here we come to the key reason people trust their investments in ZeroMQ: it's logistically impossible to buy the copyrights to create a closed source competitor to ZeroMQ. iMatix can't do this either. And the more pe…
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that copyright transfer is not even legally applicable in many jurisdictions.
CLA intimidates people to contribute. It discourages contributions
Why would people contribute to a project they don't agree to the license of? Isn't it good to discourage contributions from people who don't agree in the first place, avoiding future conflict?
In fact, by requiring a CLA, as a user of the product, you know that they organization behind the code is discouraging contributors. This is not a good thing.
CLA intimidates people to contribute. It discourages contributions
Why would people contribute to a project they don't agree to the license of? Isn't it good to discourage contributions from people who don't agree in the first place, avoiding future conflict?