Slashdot Mirror


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.'"

2 of 279 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Co-operation and Trust by exomondo · · Score: 1, Troll

    First sentence in the linked post "Contributor License Agreements ("CLAs") are a mechanism for an upstream software developer to insist that contributors grant the upstream developer some additional set of rights." Contrary to your assumption I in fact did not know what CLA stood for in this context, so simply clicked the link to find out.

    Yes they could have put that in the summary but sadly had they done that it seems there would have been next to no comments here. I'm sorry if you found some part - feel free to point it out - of the post you found "hateful".

  2. Re:For a noted pragmatist, Linus is dead wrong... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Please explain why the Linux kernel being stuck at GNU v2 is a bad thing! Really! I'd like to know, because as a Linux user, and follower and user of a vast amount of FOSS, I don't see what you are seeing as the problem!