How to make me not want to
ever contribute to you:

'Please read and sign this CLA'

( Also telling me that shit only whenI try
opening a PR, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU )

Some maintainers are absolutely psychotic.

I usually just fork their repo and maintain it myself at that point.

I'm all for OSS, but some of y'all are fucking impossible to work with.

Some devs really became way too paranoid regarding licensing issues. They often forget that licenses only matter if they are actually willing to go to court...

But if the CLA is just a redundant statement that you license your contribution under the same license as the code that already is in the repo, i normally accept.

@Oktokolo The thing is, I don't want to deal with bureaucracy when I contribute to foss in my free time, the last thing I want to do is read CLA legal talk .. and for something like that I don't just [ x ] accept, also my full name, no fucking thank you.

@ElectroArchiver i guess they want to make sure, that they legally did everything they legally can do to prevent people from smuggling in copyright/patent infringements.

Of course it is impossible to actually prevent contributors from smuggling in copyright/patent infringements. But legal accountability ends at the point where the judge thinks that you actually tried...

Whether it would work against patent trolls or some big company that wants to kill the project - probably not as the mere threat of going to court normally is enough to make the project disappear... But can't really blame em for trying to protect themselves.

CLA's are sometimes a necessary evil. If bigcorp has a multi-million pound project that contains open source code, they need to make doubly sure there's no way you can somehow claim a stake in ownership, veto the product because it contains code you wrote, etc.

The alternative is just going to be them not open sourcing it at all, which is arguably way worse.

I do feel like it's got to a point where people find them too fashionable though. Used to just be the likes of Oracle, Microsoft etc. - these days even small startups seem to have jumped on the bandwagon.