Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2015 13:18:54 -0700 From: Craig Rodrigues <rodrigc@FreeBSD.org> To: Julio Merino <jmmv@freebsd.org> Cc: "freebsd-testing@freebsd.org" <freebsd-testing@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: kyua and Google Contributor License Agreement Message-ID: <CAG=rPVdvxP6H8fpC=dGT6XySLu=eZoWkcUftq-HcSRqQTxZSjg@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <FC6166E1-D6D0-4F31-A6AD-BD53288C9A23@freebsd.org> References: <CAG=rPVeUkXB8gQG6E23WoORW2iJn1EVyeFw3DkLDmiSYZA8Hiw@mail.gmail.com> <20150930211156.GL65719@corpmail.liquidneon.com> <CAG=rPVeqcUvUt8uMM5cq6qg5F7RxqYOVZu6x02jxGCbsC6J_2A@mail.gmail.com> <FC6166E1-D6D0-4F31-A6AD-BD53288C9A23@freebsd.org>
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On Sat, Oct 17, 2015 at 7:48 PM, Julio Merino <jmmv@freebsd.org> wrote: > > The CLA exists to protect the project, and this is not something specific > to Google. If you ever want to contribute to any major open source project, > you will have to sign a CLA of some form. > It is true that some major open source projects require a CLA. For now FreeBSD is not one of those projects. In the future, who knows what will happen, but for now, FreeBSD is still moving forward and doing fine without having to require a CLA. kyua is good software, but it is fairly niche, and not widely used compared to the other projects which you listed. For this reason, I view the CLA for kyua as more of an impediment to getting new developers to help contribute to kyua. My opinion is that this impediment outweighs any benefit to kyua that the legal protections of the CLA offers. The CLA for kyua has been an unfortunate impediment for developers at EMC. I understand how things go at big companies and with lawyers. When you have something so small and insignificant to a company's bottom line like kyua, there is almost zero incentive to get lawyers involved and to sign a legal agreement with another major company (Google). I can't say for sure since I don't work there, but that is probably what happened at EMC. Apart from EMC, I see that this one patch from namore has not been integrated due to namore not having signed the CLA: https://github.com/jmmv/kyua/pull/130 I would consider the following: -> is kyua important enough to Google to justify going through the Google CLA process? They already have Googletest ( https://github.com/google/googletest ) which overlaps in functionality with ATF. Googletest seems to have more Google employees working on it, and it has more activity around it than kyua. -> is there intellectual property in kyua that is likely to trigger legal problems if there is no CLA? My opinion is that the answer is no to both these points, however this is just my opinion, and I am not an expert in these areas. In addition, kyua has been integrated into the build system for FreeBSD, which generates Kyuafiles, but no other part of FreeBSD requires a CLA. Requiring a CLA for something that is so integrated into the FreeBSD build doesn't fit in nicely with the "FreeBSD way" of doing things. -- Craig
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