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"as long as you sign our CLA, which requires you give our lawyers your personal information, including information that you might not have. Don't have a phone o

"as long as you sign our CLA, which requires you give our lawyers your personal information, including information that you might not have. Don't have a phone or permanent address? hahahaha get lost". Facebook's lawyers did some very questionable things to "open source" here.

nl 8y ago
That's how good IP hygiene works. Blame the legal system.
- Conan_Kudo 8y ago
  No, it's not. It's only how IP hygiene works if you want to abuse your contributors and request rights that realistically should _never_ be given.
  - thecatspaw 8y ago
    They need to be absolutely sure that accepting contributing is not going to bite them,so you have to sign over all rights to the code to the project owner. They own the code from that point on, not you. This is standard behaviour. Facebook differs from the standard in that they require your address, but I assume that is to make sure the CLA has the correct form
    - TheRealPomax 8y ago
      Signing over rights is one thing. Discriminating against people without a permanent address, or a phone, or any other person who can afford a laptop and not much else, and has high value contributions to make if only they would be accepted, is being an ass to humanity and you should feel bad and change that. They even require you to sign their CLA just for README.md updates - that's not "being safe", that's "being willingly idiotic". Facebook legal is not interested in changing the CLA requirements to something that doesn't discriminate, and despite the rather large number of people who work on their open source projects, who would all love for that CLA to fuck off so they can do open source properly, Facebook as an organisation is still not a good citizen in the open source space. They're still trying to put up a walled garden as much as they legally can, even if you think you can't see the wall anymore.

nl 8y ago

That's how good IP hygiene works. Blame the legal system.

Conan_Kudo 8y ago
No, it's not. It's only how IP hygiene works if you want to abuse your contributors and request rights that realistically should _never_ be given.
- thecatspaw 8y ago
  They need to be absolutely sure that accepting contributing is not going to bite them,so you have to sign over all rights to the code to the project owner. They own the code from that point on, not you. This is standard behaviour. Facebook differs from the standard in that they require your address, but I assume that is to make sure the CLA has the correct form
  - TheRealPomax 8y ago
    Signing over rights is one thing. Discriminating against people without a permanent address, or a phone, or any other person who can afford a laptop and not much else, and has high value contributions to make if only they would be accepted, is being an ass to humanity and you should feel bad and change that. They even require you to sign their CLA just for README.md updates - that's not "being safe", that's "being willingly idiotic". Facebook legal is not interested in changing the CLA requirements to something that doesn't discriminate, and despite the rather large number of people who work on their open source projects, who would all love for that CLA to fuck off so they can do open source properly, Facebook as an organisation is still not a good citizen in the open source space. They're still trying to put up a walled garden as much as they legally can, even if you think you can't see the wall anymore.