kyua and Google Contributor License Agreement

[Julio Merino]

> On Oct 1, 2015, at 14:32, Craig Rodrigues <rodrigc at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 2:11 PM, Brad Davis <brd at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 01:20:13PM -0700, Craig Rodrigues wrote:
> 
> I am in the same boat, and would love to see if we could just fork it and
> work from there.  Could Julio then contribute to the code?
> 
> I don't know all the rules that Google has regarding the CLA and
> what Google employees can and cannot contribute to.  I'll let Julio respond.

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. The FSF has one; Apache has one; the PSF has one; and a bunch of other projects have one (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement#Users).

The license of the code itself does not say much about the many other implications a contribution might have.  For this reason, and personally, I see the need to sign a CLA as not-a-bad-thing for the sanity of the project long-term, even though it might have adverse consequences in a few cases.

In fact, I'm kinda surprised that FreeBSD does not have any kind of agreement in place. When I joined NetBSD back in the day (oops, 2002), I was required to sign a contributor agreement.

> I really want to avoid forking kyua, because Julio has put a lot of
> work into putting things on Github, integrating the kyua github project
> with Travis CI (Continuous Integration), doing releases, etc.

I'm afraid that part of the concerns also come from the fact that I haven't been very responsive lately.  Had I dealt with the bugs and requests in a more timely fashion, you might not see the above as a real blocker to getting things done... but, as has been the case, I cannot make promises either.  (Spoiler alert: two kids take a ton of time!)

If anyone is serious about starting a fork, and wants to do so, please contact me privately beforehand.  I have some thoughts on the topic/process.

> My main concern is that the Google CLA is turning away potential 
> contributors, and blocking patches that people have already submitted
> from going in the kyua tree.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall that the issue here was mostly not with individuals, but with EMC not wanting to sign the corporate CLA and thus preventing the EMC employees from feeding back the code.  I am not a lawyer, but based on the contents of the CLA, I fear about the reasons for a company not wanting to sign it...

Cheers