Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

CLAs create different issues than making (small) open source contributions

utcc.utoronto.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 70 posts

Re: CLAs create different issues than making (small) open source contributions

#41

Post by mook »

saulpw wrote: post #13
williamvds wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as I see a CLA I'm turned off even using a piece of FOSS software. I get it's usually just the lawyers protecting the company just in case a contributor tries something dodgy in the future. Out of principle however, I resent the broad assignment of copyright and granting them the right to relicense. Of course I expect most of these projects would never exercise that right, but the mere fact that they _could_…

I have a CAA on my GPL project so that I have the right to start releasing it as MIT, that is, more Free. Also so I can dual-license it to a corporation and make a modicum of money from the software that is 98% my work. I absolutely never intend to make future versions non-free (and I don't even have the right to make already released versions non-free). Do you find this disturbing?

You'll probably never do things the people who contributed won't agree with. But someday you'll pass away, and the people who end up with your estate might not care about the intricacies of software and sell it off for cheap to somebody who'd rather do anything to get a return in investment.

Even if the CLA somehow said you could only relicense to MIT, they could simply do that without releasing anything, and immediately take it and use it in proprietary things :)

Re: CLAs create different issues than making (small) open source contributions

#42

Post by thatcks »

bmitc wrote: post #17

How is a CLA any different of a legal agreement than agreeing to a license? The CLAs I have seen basically boil down to the project maintainers maintaining ownership of the code, ability to adjust the license if desired, and protect them from people contributing code that the contributor doesn't have the rights for. I have seen projects suffer from single contributors stubbornly refusing to budge on relicensing, even…

A CLA is a legal contract between two parties. An open source license is a general grant of additional permissions under copyright (and sometimes some additional promises regarding things like patents), provided that the person using those permissions (to make and distribute copies) adheres to certain requirements.

(I am the author of the linked-to article.)

Re: CLAs create different issues than making (small) open source contributions

#43

Post by noname120 »

coldpie wrote: post #28
phkahler wrote: post #20

We used to have a CLA for Solvespace (CAD) which is under the GPL3 license. There was some pressure to eliminate it, and some practical reasons as well so we dropped it. Since then, both FreeCAD (assembly 3) and Blender (via CAD sketcher add-on) have been using our constraint solver to great effect. Unfortunately they will probably never be able to tightly integrate it because both those projects are under GPLv2. I s…

> but we no longer have a CLA so relicensing or dual licensing is off the table. Why is it off the table? Email your contributors and ask if anyone objects. If they object or don't reply, you can probably rewrite the code they contributed, or argue it's too small/trivial to justify a copyright claim. To be blunt, it's extremely unlikely someone is going to sue or even raise a stink over a small contribution. It's mor…

VLC did a relicense a few years ago and it required them to contact 300+ contributors (!) and even stalk a few of them IRL in order to get in touch with them. Nobody wants to go through this pain…

Part 1: https://jbkempf.com/blog/how-to-properly-relicense-a-large-o...

Part 2: https://jbkempf.com/blog/how-to-properly-relicense-a-large-o...

Part 3: https://jbkempf.com/blog/how-to-properly-relicense-a-large-o...

Re: CLAs create different issues than making (small) open source contributions

#44

Post by saulpw »

bkor wrote: post #16
saulpw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a CAA on my GPL project so that I have the right to start releasing it as MIT, that is, more Free. Also so I can dual-license it to a corporation and make a modicum of money from the software that is 98% my work. I absolutely never intend to make future versions non-free (and I don't even have the right to make already released versions non-free). Do you find this disturbing?

> I have a CAA on my GPL project so that I have the right to start releasing it as MIT, that is, more Free. That really depends on the CAA. It might allow way more. The text might be (legally) not applicable or have flaws, etc. > Do you find this disturbing? It is a barrier to contribute. I would not even bother trying to contribute. Your statements here are already a bit conflicting to me. You partly might want to m…

> Feels like you want to keep all options open.

Yeah, I've put 7 years and thousands of hours into it. I do want to keep my options open!

> loads of non-CAA pure GPL software never receive any contributions.

Yup, for several years before I had a CAA I received almost no contributions, except from people I had a direct personal relationship with. The CAA hasn't deterred people, in fact if you look at the timeline, I've gotten more contributors since I've put the CAA into place. (I'm sure it's not cause and effect, but still.)

> It is a barrier to contribute. I would not even bother trying to contribute.

I used to think that I would want any and all contributions to my project. But I've learned over time that, except for trivial changes, a PR from a new contributor is more effort than it's worth, by itself. I mean I can write code, and I do--lots of it. The real value in contributing is everything else: documentation, bugfixing, sincere attention on the problem. So I realized that I'm looking for repeat contributors, the ones who are going to invest in the project, and become active community members, maybe even maintainers. And the low-effort drive-by contributors who would be deterred by e.g. a CAA were never the contributors that were going to move the needle anyway.

In fact, and please correct me if I'm wrong, based on your general tone above, I'm guessing that you've never been an active contributor to any open source project, CLA/CAA or not. In which case, I consider the CAA to have been effective: you can feel self-righteous and I avoid the hassle.

Re: CLAs create different issues than making (small) open source contributions

#45

Post by coldpie »

noname120 wrote: post #43
coldpie wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but we no longer have a CLA so relicensing or dual licensing is off the table. Why is it off the table? Email your contributors and ask if anyone objects. If they object or don't reply, you can probably rewrite the code they contributed, or argue it's too small/trivial to justify a copyright claim. To be blunt, it's extremely unlikely someone is going to sue or even raise a stink over a small contribution. It's mor…

VLC did a relicense a few years ago and it required them to contact 300+ contributors (!) and even stalk a few of them IRL in order to get in touch with them. Nobody wants to go through this pain… Part 1: https://jbkempf.com/blog/how-to-properly-relicense-a-large-o... Part 2: https://jbkempf.com/blog/how-to-properly-relicense-a-large-o... Part 3: https://jbkempf.com/blog/how-to-properly-relicense-a-large-o...

In my opinion, they went way above what was required. A lot of that pain was self-inflicted. In all of that work, they didn't have a single person object to the license change. I feel confident saying that there are zero people who meet all of these requirements to cause a real problem:

1) contributed enough code to genuinely have a copyright claim,

2) are still alive,

3) are not easily contactable, and

4) care enough about their contribution to file a legal claim over it.

IMO they could have stopped after the emails and a quick look through the remaining unaccounted-for code for any genuinely significant contributions. They didn't need to go hunt down one guy who changed two characters in a comment ("Quite a few people were surprised that I would mail them ('I only wrote one small commit', 'This was minor code').").

Re: CLAs create different issues than making (small) open source contributions

#47

Post by JohnFen »

remram wrote: post #4

I've been turned off many times from contributing because projects had incomplete or inscrutable CLAs. Of course, the person in charge of asking for a CLA signature is usually not very knowledgeable about their own CLA, being a programmer and not a lawyer. For example, I have been asked to sign CLAs that granted rights to "recipients" or "organizations" that they hadn't named, having simply adopted a template CLA wit…

I agree. The existence of a CLA is a big red flag to me, and I avoid such projects.

Re: CLAs create different issues than making (small) open source contributions

#48

Post by [deleted] »

gavinhoward wrote: post #21

I agree with this, but at the same time, that's exactly why I will have a CLA. I am a one-man shop. I struggle to read code written by others because I struggle to build theory of mind. So I do not want your contributions. My CLA is supposed to drive you away from giving them to me. But on the flip side, I also want to be able to give commercial licenses to customers instead of the current AGPL-like license I have. F…

[deleted]

Re: CLAs create different issues than making (small) open source contributions

#49

Post by JohnFen »

gavinhoward wrote: post #31
electroly wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't have any other contributors, you're free to offer any license to anyone you'd like. Simply not accepting contributions will do the trick; you don't also need a CLA in that situation. It doesn't make sense to have a CLA for a project that doesn't accept contributions.

The CLA is really for corporate customers who give me bug fixes for their environments.

So then, you do want contributions.

Re: CLAs create different issues than making (small) open source contributions

#50

Post by JohnFen »

elric wrote: post #18

Some organizations (IBM/Eclipse) require signing agreements before you can even log an issue on their bug tracker. It's a pain, and I really can't be arsed.

Yes, those are crazy policies. In effect, all they're saying is "we don't want bug reports".
Post reply on HN