57 ms·
They're asking contributors to sign a CLA which assigns copyright for your changes to them. Quick reminder: do not sign this kind of agreement. It's deliberatel
by ddevault 6y ago
They're asking contributors to sign a CLA which assigns copyright for your changes to them. Quick reminder: do not sign this kind of agreement. It's deliberately designed for them to pull the rug out from under you and make this proprietary again after a period of enjoying the benefits of community contributions. Shame on them for asking in the first place.
- webmobdev 6y agoOn a different issue - Without such a CLA, can they dual-license and commercialise their product? How did MySQL work for example?
- dblock 6y agoThis is important, +1. If you want an example of what successful OSS looks like for over 10 years now, https://github.com/artsy https://github.com/artsy, MIT license.
- lostmsu 6y agoWhat do you mean "pull rug out of you"? If they decide to discontinue GPL edition, you are free to pick it up from where they left.
- ddevault 6y agoIt signals that they're not making a long-term committment to open source. When they pull the rug out from under you, the community will have to scramble to put together a viable fork. It is a highly disruptive event that we've seen happen many times. Some communities never recover.
- lostmsu 6y agoIt is not that hard to fork. Just look at the sheer number of Chromium forks. Even Firefox had one or two until recently.
- tzs 6y agoThe author of the above comment has a blog post on CLAs, which was submitted to HN a couple years ago and drew quite a bit of discussion. That discussion is here [1], in case anyone wants more detail on his position or wants to argue against it without just rehashing things already dealt with. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18148365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18148365