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Comment by jhchen | Hacker News Reader

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jhchen

What's wrong with a CLA? It's incredibly common for projects open sourced by companies.

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Why Your Project Doesn’t Need a Contributor Licensing Agreement, Monday 9 June 2014 by Bradley M. Kuhn:

http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/06/09/do-not-need-cla.html

It means that the company owns the copyright to everything and can close the source again any time they want.

EDIT

Dear mods. Some pretty measured posts are getting serious heat in this (and other threads relating to MS) maybe you could look into it?

The FSF has requires contributors to sign one too. Are they evil as well?

They require a CLA for exactly the same reason. So that they can change the licence later on if they want.

However, the FSF has a different record to Microsoft over the last 40 years wrt FOSS software.

No. But you have that backwards. The FSF is good because they protect everyone's freedom to use the software, and one of the ways they do that is through copyright assignment (not a CLA).

It also means that the company can sell proprietary versions with extended functionality, and the company is therefore motivated to not allow contributions to the free code which duplicates functionality which they sell.

However, since ChakraCore is released under a permissive license (like most corporate open source projects), Microsoft could do the same thing without a CLA. It matters more when something is under a GPL variant...

It's a good point, but it matters for Apache licensed code, too, because Apache 2.0 has a self-destruct clause in the patent grant to keep all parties' lawyers in check. CLAs (like the one Microsoft uses) routes around that.

The way this ends up working for Microsoft projects licensed under Apache 2.0 is that it essentially allows Microsoft to do anything with the contributions (as if it were licensed under MIT, with a liberal interpretation of the implied patent grant), but requires everyone else to continue abiding by Apache 2.0. Not exactly balanced.

EDIT: I'm totally confused about why people are having a problem with this comment.

>I'm totally confused about why people are having a problem with this comment.

It seems like half of this submission is a graveyard. Disappointing.

Anything that discusses MS seems to attract this kind of rather heavy down-voting.

Many license allows that without a CLA. The CLA allows the company to change the license of the code to whatever they want. Which is usually inhibited by license compatibility...

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