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Keep in mind that contributing to Go requires that you sign a contributor license agreement, something people might not want to go through (no pun intended) for

by fhs 12y ago

Keep in mind that contributing to Go requires that you sign a contributor license agreement, something people might not want to go through (no pun intended) for small changes.

baldfat 12y ago
BUT this allows for easier changing of the licensing.
- StevePerkins 12y ago
  That's a "feature"? (from a contributor perspective)
  - DannyBee 12y ago
    A fairly large number of projects decide to change their license later in life, but this is mostly if they start off with more "restrictive" (for lack of a better term, i know how Free software advocates feel about this) licenses, like GPLv3 or whatever, or because they discover the license doesn't work well for what they wanted. For example, Eigen, a very widely used math library, switched licenses because they were mistaken about the implications of LGPL, and as it started getting more widely used, it started affecting usage. Other projects grow runtime libraries, and discover they don't want licenses that require attribution for those, because then everyone who makes a binary has to ship notices, etc. There are even simpler cases. For example, llgo, the Go language frontend for LLVM, is being contributed to the LLVM project. This requires a license change to the same license as LLVM. Because there were no contributor agreements, every contributor had to be tracked down and asked. A bunch are either dead or not around anymore, and now those contributions have to be rewritten or excised. This has slowed them down a few months so far (at least from my view, pcc can surely correct me if it hasn't been that long) In terms of how often this happens, i've personally helped about 50 medium-high profile open source projects change licenses, and it's not even my "real job". It's fairly common that as a project goes from nothing to having a lot of users, they end up having to change something about their licensing. It's also a massive pain when there are no CLA's.
  - baldfat 12y ago
    Sorry I should have put a sarcasm tag :P
untothebreach 12y ago
I believe Rust requires a CLA as well. Might be wrong, but I seem to remember getting a mail about that a while back. A rust dev that knows for sure can correct me, if necessary.
- brson 12y ago
  Rust does not require a CLA.
  - DannyBee 12y ago
    Not quite right. "Those with review privileges or direct push access are required to file a Mozilla "committer agreement". " (FWIW: From a legal standpoint, this doesn't make any sense. Either all-in or all-out makes sense. There is no legal distinction to be drawn that the above captures, AFAIK)
    - pcwalton 12y ago
      See the committer agreement section 4, which covers this case: https://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/commit-access/committers-agreement.pdf https://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/commit-acces... All code committed to the Rust repository goes through someone who has signed a CLA, including this section. Rust uses the same policies here as Firefox.
      - DannyBee 12y ago
        So does this mean all original code (IE not third party code) requires a CLA? Or not? If so, then Rust requires CLAs. Great, legally sound. If not, this makes no legal sense. Simply having people with a CLA commit it buys you nothing, legally :) As I said, all-in and all-out policies make sense. Pass through policies (IE i can commit code by another), you may as well have no CLA. It's just overhead with no legal benefit. The benefit of CLA's is to have legal assertions about ownership and patents, from the people who wrote the code. So without having the people who actually wrote the code make those assertions, you get nothing legally. In those cases, or if it isn't your goal (like the DCO folks), you might as well move to the developers certificate of origin model, and get the same benefits, without any of the overhead.
deleted 12y ago
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by fhs 12y ago

Keep in mind that contributing to Go requires that you sign a contributor license agreement, something people might not want to go through (no pun intended) for small changes.

baldfat 12y ago

BUT this allows for easier changing of the licensing.

StevePerkins 12y ago
That's a "feature"? (from a contributor perspective)
- DannyBee 12y ago
  A fairly large number of projects decide to change their license later in life, but this is mostly if they start off with more "restrictive" (for lack of a better term, i know how Free software advocates feel about this) licenses, like GPLv3 or whatever, or because they discover the license doesn't work well for what they wanted. For example, Eigen, a very widely used math library, switched licenses because they were mistaken about the implications of LGPL, and as it started getting more widely used, it started affecting usage. Other projects grow runtime libraries, and discover they don't want licenses that require attribution for those, because then everyone who makes a binary has to ship notices, etc. There are even simpler cases. For example, llgo, the Go language frontend for LLVM, is being contributed to the LLVM project. This requires a license change to the same license as LLVM. Because there were no contributor agreements, every contributor had to be tracked down and asked. A bunch are either dead or not around anymore, and now those contributions have to be rewritten or excised. This has slowed them down a few months so far (at least from my view, pcc can surely correct me if it hasn't been that long) In terms of how often this happens, i've personally helped about 50 medium-high profile open source projects change licenses, and it's not even my "real job". It's fairly common that as a project goes from nothing to having a lot of users, they end up having to change something about their licensing. It's also a massive pain when there are no CLA's.
- baldfat 12y ago
  Sorry I should have put a sarcasm tag :P

untothebreach 12y ago

I believe Rust requires a CLA as well. Might be wrong, but I seem to remember getting a mail about that a while back. A rust dev that knows for sure can correct me, if necessary.

brson 12y ago
Rust does not require a CLA.
- DannyBee 12y ago
  Not quite right. "Those with review privileges or direct push access are required to file a Mozilla "committer agreement". " (FWIW: From a legal standpoint, this doesn't make any sense. Either all-in or all-out makes sense. There is no legal distinction to be drawn that the above captures, AFAIK)
  - pcwalton 12y ago
    See the committer agreement section 4, which covers this case: https://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/commit-access/committers-agreement.pdf https://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/commit-acces... All code committed to the Rust repository goes through someone who has signed a CLA, including this section. Rust uses the same policies here as Firefox.
    - DannyBee 12y ago
      So does this mean all original code (IE not third party code) requires a CLA? Or not? If so, then Rust requires CLAs. Great, legally sound. If not, this makes no legal sense. Simply having people with a CLA commit it buys you nothing, legally :) As I said, all-in and all-out policies make sense. Pass through policies (IE i can commit code by another), you may as well have no CLA. It's just overhead with no legal benefit. The benefit of CLA's is to have legal assertions about ownership and patents, from the people who wrote the code. So without having the people who actually wrote the code make those assertions, you get nothing legally. In those cases, or if it isn't your goal (like the DCO folks), you might as well move to the developers certificate of origin model, and get the same benefits, without any of the overhead.

deleted 12y ago

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