alt Hacker News> The older OSS projects become, the more they fossilize too - and that makes it more annoying to contribute.
Newer ones can be just as braindead, if they came out of some commercial entity. CLAs and such.
> The older OSS projects become, the more they fossilize too - and that makes it more annoying to contribute.
Newer ones can be just as braindead, if they came out of some commercial entity. CLAs and such.
That CLA is a curious take, as the old, avowedly non-commercial, GNU foundational tools such as the ones we're talking about like "ls" in coreutils, have always required a kind of strong CLA to be signed from the very beginning, even when they wee new, nimble and fun to contribute to.
Their kind of CLA was designed to uphold community and openness values more strongly than GPL alone, by helping GNU to pursue GPL violators through the law, to fource vendors to release source code when GPL code was shipped in products..
So I've never understood the blanket "don't like regardless of what it says" attitude to CLAs and such.
Surely it should depend on what the CLA says?
Some people object to CLAs that grant upstream less rights than BSD/MIT/Apache licenses grant upstream by defaut. ("No way, the CLA lets them make. a private, commercial fork of my code!"). Yet the same people contribute enthusiastically to BSD/MIT/Apache projects with exactly the same upstream property ("I don't mind that the license let's them make a private, commercial fork of my code!").