3 ms·
I see. Thank you. So the question is, are they acting in bad faith if they attempt to use a CLA to subvert the open source license?
by linkmotif 8y ago
I see. Thank you.
So the question is, are they acting in bad faith if they attempt to use a CLA to subvert the open source license?
- guitarbill 8y agoI think the point is to assume good faith on the contributer's side, i.e. that they will follow in the letter and spirit of the OS license, so a CLA is unnecessary. Conversely, by putting a CLA in place, the subtext is "I think you're probably a scumbag (=person acting in bad faith) and don't trust the OS licenses used for billions of lines of code, so I'm going to hit you with a CLA preemptively". As an interesting bit of context, the European legal system skews more towards the spirit of the law, allowing for shorter legal documents/contracts. Whereas the US legal system skews towards the letter of the law, meaning contracts end up being several hundred pages, littered by garbage like "including but not limited to", and things like that.
- linkmotif 8y agoThank you for the additional context.