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Linus Torvalds: Any CLA Is Fundamentally Broken
sfcrazy writes "The controversy over Canonical's Contributor License Agreement (CLA) has once again surfaced. While Matthew Garrett raises valid points about the flaws in Canonical's CLAs, Linus Torvalds says 'To be fair, people just like hating on Canonical. The FSF and Apache Foundation CLA's are pretty much equally broken. And they may not be broken because of any relicencing, but because the copyright assignment paperwork ends up basically killing the community. Basically, with a CLA, you don't get the kind of "long tail" that the kernel has of random drive-by patches. And since that's how lots of people try the waters, any CLA at all – changing the license or not – is fundamentally broken.'"
Why doesn't the summary for articles like these spell out unfamiliar abbreviations such as "contributor license agreement"?
Free and Open source software are about working together to write software, its unquestionably good.
There are tens of billions of dollars worth of Libre code out there, with thousands of unpunished violators, and only 2 or 3 people in the world defending it.
And this "community" persistently rallies against working tegether Legally with CLA, i just dont understand, is it purely a trust thing ?
(And if you want to help defend Free Software, consider donating to the Software Freedom Conservency)
But he's a wise asshole. Not cow-towing to the fail that is GPL 3 (kernel, git and subsurface.) Not climbing on the CLA bandwagon...
One day Linus will be gone and Linux will probably fall into the hands of license-mongering zealots. I'm glad I probably won't be around to suffer that.
Lack of trust.
This is what this is all about. Many people view Canonical as untrustwory for one reason or another. I could cite a whole litany. However, that's not the point.
Many people find reason to be suspicious of Canonical in a way that isn't comparable to anything regarding the FSF or Apache. It's not a remotely comparable situation.
As a general rule, CLAs originating from any corporation with the standard "fuck everyone else" style charter should be met with skepticism. They're not your friends. They probably aren't even your ally.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Normally, I see Linus being pragmatic about things, but I have no idea why he's against CLAs.
Having a CLA (with some form of copyright assignment or "unlimited" sublicensing) is the ONLY way to run a flexible, long-term Open Source project.
The Linux kernel is the only substantial project that doesn't do this, and, frankly, can only get away with it because it's so critical. Even there, it's a pain, because (to pick a stellar example), Linux will NEVER be able to relicense itself under an improved GNU license. It's stuck FOREVER on the GNU v2 license. Which is hardly a good thing.
CLAs are a consequence of copyright, just like the licenses themselves are. They're necessary to allow a project to update the license, defend the entire codebase in court, keep track of ACTUAL authors, etc. If you don't have this, you have a toy project, one which ultimately will fail to succeed.
If you don't like CLAs, then use the BSD or Public Domain route, because they're the only licenses (or non-license) that avoids all the traps of copyright law. Otherwise, if you want copyleft of any sort, then you have to use a CLA.
Linus is basically complaining that having a driver's license is an obstacle to people just getting on the road and driving whenever they want. Sure, CLAs restrict the "fly by night" patcher. That's a feature not a bug. Sometimes, you do want to set the bar higher than the lowest common denominator. Naturally, some CLAs are worse than others, but the concept as a whole is sound.
-Erik
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