kyua and Google Contributor License Agreement

[Craig Rodrigues]

On Sat, Oct 17, 2015 at 7:48 PM, Julio Merino <jmmv at 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