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.'"

Comments

Spell it out the first time

[tepples]

Why doesn't the summary for articles like these spell out unfamiliar abbreviations such as "contributor license agreement"?

Re:Spell it out the first time

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess CLA clearly doesn't stand for "Clear and Labeled Acronym"...

Re:Spell it out the first time

[icebike]

I'm pretty sure they were talking about Conjugated linoleic acid. After all, that is the number one hit in google.

Re:Spell it out the first time

[bob_super]

I was going for Chlamydia, Lupus and AIDS, and then I remembered that House has been finished for a while.

Re:Spell it out the first time

[techno-vampire]

Because the submitter doesn't know how to do it right, and the "editors" don't know how to do their job. What else do you expect from Slashdot?

Re:Spell it out the first time

[gallondr00nk]

Or mention the problem people have with the Canonical CLA in the first place, which according to TFA is the requirement that contributers sign an agreement that gives Canonical the right to relicense their contribution under a proprietary licence.

Re:Spell it out the first time

[TWX]

Because the submitter doesn't know how to do it right, and the "editors" don't know how to do their job. What else do you expect from Slashdot?

I used to expect a lot more from Slashdot, but now that none of the old-guard are left it's steadily and inexorably slipping in the same fashion that kuro5hin, The Register, and other tech sites have slipped.

In case you didn't know, there are holding companies buying up forums, news sites, aggregators, etc. At this point half-a-dozen automotive forums that I've used are now under one company, and that company milks the forums for advertising revenue without really policing the forums for abuse anymore. Since those forums lack a community-policing method like Slashdot and a few others there's very little to stop the race to the bottom as suddenly off-topic discussions, especially politics, come to pollute the original purpose with garbage that has nothing to do with cars.

These companies often don't advertise that they're in charge of so many forums, but some like The HAMB do. I encourage people to leave forums that head down this route, it's the only way to let these companies know that we don't appreciate what they're doing. Unfortunately that's probably a losing battle as there are a lot more users to replace those that walk away.

Re:Spell it out the first time

[kesuki]

Complete
Loss
Altogether
google is worthless urban dictionary equally so, and it's not in the jargon file. this is classic slashdot, making up acronyms no one can figure out. wikipedia had the best page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLA
but i can't figure out how a command line argument is related.

Re:Spell it out the first time

[lgw]

Chlamydia, Lupus and AIDS

What are "better things than Dice's editing", Alex?

Re:Spell it out the first time

[Phroggy]

I used to expect a lot more from Slashdot, but now that none of the old-guard are left it's steadily and inexorably slipping in the same fashion that kuro5hin, The Register, and other tech sites have slipped.

The "old guard" editors didn't know how to do their jobs either. Note my user ID; I remember. I come here for the comments, not the articles.

Re:Spell it out the first time

[synaptik]

Yes; but back then it was because they were amateurs, doing this for a hobby.

Re:Spell it out the first time

[CauseBy]

Seriously. I've been reading since 1999 (under different accounts) and trust me, the editing was definitely even worse back then. We used to have mis-spelled words, broken links, and sentences the cut off in the mi

Re:Spell it out the first time

[haruchai]

I was wondering how much Linus knows about Conjugated Linoleic Acids.

Re:Spell it out the first time

[fractoid]

The issue isn't that it's an unfamiliar abbreviation, the issue is that the TLA namespace is so horribly cluttered now that CLA could mean any one of between 74 and 85 different things.

Re:Spell it out the first time

[ShanghaiBill]

Because they hope your interest will fuel the very slightest bit of initiative, like the ~5 seconds it takes to Google it?

I tried Googling it. Google said it meant "Conjugated Linoleic Acid". According to the linked Wikipedia article, it is high in trans-fat, so it is a good thing that Linus doesn't care for the stuff.

Re:Spell it out the first time

[Rob Riggs]

If you want news and articles, honestly Yahoo's News is not too bad.

And if you need personal or professional advise, there's no better place than Yahoo! Answers."

Re:Spell it out the first time

[dreamchaser]

Because they hope your interest will fuel the very slightest bit of initiative, like the ~5 seconds it takes to Google it?

Just a guess, but it worked for me! No whinging here about such a trivial matter. I mean, if you are seeing this site anyway, you are definitely online...

That's a bullshit answer. It is standard practice in good writing to say what an acronym or abbreviation means the first time it's used. Afterwards using the shortened version is just fine.

Re:Spell it out the first time

[sconeu]

Tell me about settle for ELIZA?

Re:Spell it out the first time

[zoward]

Also, the Slashdot editors need to understand that when they don't spell out these acronyms the first time they use them, the first half of the comments section is going be discussing the lack of proper acronym definition and poor editorial skills instead of, you know, the actual article content. Just sayin'.

CLA

[ZackSchil]

Yes of course, the CLA. I have long hated CLAs. CLAs are a problem and someone should do something about the CLAs.

As can ANY of the major CLAs...

[trims]

Take a look at pretty much any major CLA out there.

I'll name three big ones: OpenJDK, FSF's for GNU, and Apache's.

ALL of them either directly assign the copyright of the contribution to the org, and thus, you lose any ability to control it whatsoever, or give the org the ability to relicense it explicitly.

This is intentional, and a GOOD thing, because it increases the flexibility of the project, including making it easier to defend rights in court. Frankly, have a project with multiple copyright assignment is impossible to manage from a legal standpoint, let alone one where you don't even know the real identity of a contribution's author.

The Linux kernel is stuck on the GNU v2 license for exactly this reason, and can never change. That's the fate of any such non-CLA'd Open Source project (other than something using Public Domain or the BSD license).

FYI: the FSF can (and has) relicensed code contributed to GNU projects under a proprietary license. (gcc and part of the toolchain)

Re:As can ANY of the major CLAs...

[ustolemyname]

The Linux kernel is stuck on the GNU v2 license for exactly this reason, and can never change. That's the fate of any such non-CLA'd Open Source project (other than something using Public Domain or the BSD license).

Actually no, the Linux kernel is stuck on the GNU GPL v2 because Linus made that decision on purpose. The default GNU license allows for relicencing under any later version, but Linux removed that clause on purpose.

Here's his rant against GPLv3: https://lkml.org/lkml/2006/9/2...

Re:For a noted pragmatist, Linus is dead wrong...

[Anonymous Coward]

On the contrary, Linux is quite right. Lots of long-term open source projects don't require copyright assignment and I'm not likely to work for any which do. The reason is quite simple: If I'm contributing my time and effort to a project, I don't want the project's code to get relicensed without my concent. If a company, such as Canonical, wants me to contribute then they should be prepared to let me keep copyright of my code so I can be assured it won't get tucked away in a closed source project.

The Linux kernel not getting relicensed under a newer form of the GPL is a feature, not a bug. Some companies which use Linux now wouldn't if it switched to the GPLv3 because the newer license isn't as friendly (or easy to read) as the old one.

Re:For a noted pragmatist, Linus is dead wrong...

[phantomfive]

Normally, I see Linus being pragmatic about things, but I have no idea why he's against CLAs.

Linus doesn't like them because it's an extra barrier for people who might want to contribute to the code. The more barriers you have to contributors, the fewer will contribute. I can tell you that I fixed some bugs in Android, which I didn't contribute back, because the process was too painful (and that was before I realized there was a CLA; if I'd known that, I wouldn't have even tried).

Of course, there are benefits to CLAs, as you point out, and Eban Moglen points out other benefits. It's a matter of choosing what your priorities are. Linus favors the ease of contribution. He also considers the fact that Linux is stuck forever on GPLv2 to be a feature, not a problem.

Not true

[linuxhansl]

Let me just go ahead and call this bullshit. I am a committer to Apache HBase, and we see (and encourage) drive by patches all the time. The only folks who have to sign a CLA are the committers themselves, which seems reasonable to me.