La CLA secondo Linus

Siete haters

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.

e ancora:

+Matthew Garrett btw, at least historically, the FSF CLA was the most onerous by far, requiring a paper copy to be mailed. It may be that the FSF has gotten with the times and accepts these things electronically, but I still refuse to have anything to do with the FSF after they wanted me to send dead trees across the ocean in order to accept some trivial patch of mine back in the days.


As far as I can tell, both Canonical and Qt are ahead in this respect, making it at least easy to say “sure, take my patch” online. As a result, I’d personally prefer to work with them rather than with the insane FSF rules (I tried to google the current FSF rules, and they seem to still be about actual paperpaperwork, but maybe the stuff I found is out-of-date).


I really think you have to weigh the practical “how much does this annoy the random person”, while realizing that most people don’t actually get all that hung up about the licenses themselves.