El tema de las CLAs (Contributor License Agreement) está en boca
de todos estos días debido a que es uno de las mayores pegas que se
esgrimen a la adopción de upstart como sistema de inicio de Debian. Los
defensores de upstart argumentan que no solo Canonical sino otras
organizaciones usan CLAs, incluyendo la FSF.
Matthew Garrett ha escrito una entrada titulada Not all CLAs are
equal, analizando el uso que hacen de las CLAs diferentes proyectos
de software libre y empresas:
In contrast, Canonical ship software under the GPLv3 family of
licenses (GPL, AGPL and LGPL) but require that contributors sign an
agreement that permits Canonical to relicense their contributions
under a proprietary license. This is a fundamentally different
situation to almost all widely accepted CLAs, and it's disingenuous
for Canonical to defend their CLA by pointing out the broad community
uptake of, for instance, the Apache CLA.
(También las puntualizaciones respecto a la situación de Qt en los
comentarios son relevantes)
En cambio, Linus Torvalds parece que está en total desacuerdo:
“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.”
:wq