5 ms·

What's wrong with a CLA? It's incredibly common for projects open sourced by companies.

by jhchen 11y ago

JupiterMoon 11y ago
It means that the company owns the copyright to everything and can close the source again any time they want. EDIT Dear mods. Some pretty measured posts are getting serious heat in this (and other threads relating to MS) maybe you could look into it?
- teddyh 11y ago
  It also means that the company can sell proprietary versions with extended functionality, and the company is therefore motivated to not allow contributions to the free code which duplicates functionality which they sell.
  - comex 11y ago
    However, since ChakraCore is released under a permissive license (like most corporate open source projects), Microsoft could do the same thing without a CLA. It matters more when something is under a GPL variant...
    - carussell 11y ago
      It's a good point, but it matters for Apache licensed code, too, because Apache 2.0 has a self-destruct clause in the patent grant to keep all parties' lawyers in check. CLAs (like the one Microsoft uses) routes around that. The way this ends up working for Microsoft projects licensed under Apache 2.0 is that it essentially allows Microsoft to do anything with the contributions (as if it were licensed under MIT, with a liberal interpretation of the implied patent grant), but requires everyone else to continue abiding by Apache 2.0. Not exactly balanced. EDIT: I'm totally confused about why people are having a problem with this comment.
      - krisdol 11y ago
        >I'm totally confused about why people are having a problem with this comment. It seems like half of this submission is a graveyard. Disappointing.
        JupiterMoon 11y ago
        Anything that discusses MS seems to attract this kind of rather heavy down-voting.
- Joky 11y ago
  Many license allows that without a CLA. The CLA allows the company to change the license of the code to whatever they want. Which is usually inhibited by license compatibility...
- Sanddancer 11y ago
  The FSF has requires contributors to sign one too. Are they evil as well?
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    They require a CLA for exactly the same reason. So that they can change the licence later on if they want. However, the FSF has a different record to Microsoft over the last 40 years wrt FOSS software.
  - yarrel 11y ago
    No. But you have that backwards. The FSF is good because they protect everyone's freedom to use the software, and one of the ways they do that is through copyright assignment (not a CLA).
teddyh 11y ago
Why Your Project Doesn’t Need a Contributor Licensing Agreement, Monday 9 June 2014 by Bradley M. Kuhn: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/06/09/do-not-need-cla.html http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/06/09/do-not-need-cla.html

What's wrong with a CLA? It's incredibly common for projects open sourced by companies.

by jhchen 11y ago

What's wrong with a CLA? It's incredibly common for projects open sourced by companies.

It means that the company owns the copyright to everything and can close the source again any time they want. EDIT Dear mods. Some pretty measured posts are getting serious heat in this (and other threads relating to MS) maybe you could look into it?

teddyh 11y ago
It also means that the company can sell proprietary versions with extended functionality, and the company is therefore motivated to not allow contributions to the free code which duplicates functionality which they sell.
- comex 11y ago
  However, since ChakraCore is released under a permissive license (like most corporate open source projects), Microsoft could do the same thing without a CLA. It matters more when something is under a GPL variant...
  - carussell 11y ago
    It's a good point, but it matters for Apache licensed code, too, because Apache 2.0 has a self-destruct clause in the patent grant to keep all parties' lawyers in check. CLAs (like the one Microsoft uses) routes around that. The way this ends up working for Microsoft projects licensed under Apache 2.0 is that it essentially allows Microsoft to do anything with the contributions (as if it were licensed under MIT, with a liberal interpretation of the implied patent grant), but requires everyone else to continue abiding by Apache 2.0. Not exactly balanced. EDIT: I'm totally confused about why people are having a problem with this comment.
    - krisdol 11y ago
      >I'm totally confused about why people are having a problem with this comment. It seems like half of this submission is a graveyard. Disappointing.
      - JupiterMoon 11y ago
        Anything that discusses MS seems to attract this kind of rather heavy down-voting.
Joky 11y ago
Many license allows that without a CLA. The CLA allows the company to change the license of the code to whatever they want. Which is usually inhibited by license compatibility...
Sanddancer 11y ago
The FSF has requires contributors to sign one too. Are they evil as well?
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  They require a CLA for exactly the same reason. So that they can change the licence later on if they want. However, the FSF has a different record to Microsoft over the last 40 years wrt FOSS software.
- yarrel 11y ago
  No. But you have that backwards. The FSF is good because they protect everyone's freedom to use the software, and one of the ways they do that is through copyright assignment (not a CLA).

teddyh 11y ago

Why Your Project Doesn’t Need a Contributor Licensing Agreement, Monday 9 June 2014 by Bradley M. Kuhn: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/06/09/do-not-need-cla.html http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/06/09/do-not-need-cla.html