Contributor License Agreement

[Ryuno-Ki]

This is caused by a comment thread of #125.

It is about the position towards CLAs. You may want to read Khan Academy's CLA first (links to a google form).

[Ryuno-Ki]

My personal stand on this. I got cautions after Canonical required a CLA see arguments by Matthew Garrett.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2535&v=CUOAUQJ-y00

Plus, Khan's CLA reads quite legalese (naturally, since it has to hold stand in legal battles). So just get pinged by a bot which insists on signing it is not enough to me.

What's your opinion on this? I can imagine, it can generate great insights for the team behind Khan's Academy.

[xymostech]

Hello! I'm one of the people who originally got Khan Academy set up with a CLA system when we were releasing KaTeX.

I'm a little bit confused what about our CLA is preventing you from signing, based on that article. tota11y is currently licensed under the MIT license, so anybody is free to relicense or sell the code. It seems like the article you linked is cautioning about Canonical's CLA letting them relicense GPL code under a proprietary license, which doesn't apply here AFAIK.

The text of our CLA is indeed pretty dense, but I believe it is almost a straight transcription of the Apache CLA: https://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.pdf (with an extra section about sublicenses, a section removed about submitting other people's works, and "the Foundation" -> "Khan Academy"). Hopefully that eases some concern about what's written in there?

I'd love to hear your thoughts about this, since we'd like the CLA to not be the limiting factor for people contributing to our open source projects.

[Ryuno-Ki]

Good evening, @xymostech,

may I ask you what made you move the Khan Academy to set up the CLA?

As I mentioned before I got cautious when I see a CLA. That is, it would make me take some time to read it carefully and trying to understand, what the implication could be.

For example, what about all those patent cases? What happens with Intellectual Property etc.?

If you would „just use” the license as most other projects here, I could rely on GitHub's summary in Choose a license for MIT to get a nice overview about what's in for me.

With a CLA I have to compare it against the license text.

The easiest way out I can imagine, would be to add a section to khanbot's auto-reply (as example) to add a link about what the Legalese means / a comparison to the standard license text). Choose a license could serve as easy to grasp comparison table.

What do you think?

[DanielRuf]

The CLAs in big orgs are usually just to ensure that the contributors are aware of the (legal) rights and what can be done with their contributions, image, name, ....

It is not directly tied to the code license. And it addresses IPR issues.

And yes, they are meant to be read and understood. I've worked on a few larger projects like magento2 and this is common (also marketing now needs the consent if they can show your profile at conferences and other things which are often in the CLAs).

[ericrallen]

I feel like this Issue can probably be closed after almost a year of no discussion.

CLAs are pretty common when contributing to repos owned by an organization of any significant size, and despite my feelings that they aren't a great addition to the Open Source world, they are sort of a fact of life at this point.

If you are still interested in some of the problems with CLAs from the individual contributor side of things, here are some relevant articles that seem to capture the issues well:

• https://ben.balter.com/2018/01/02/why-you-probably-shouldnt-add-a-cla-to-your-open-source-project/
• https://drewdevault.com/2018/10/05/Dont-sign-a-CLA.html