How would you run a project like this? People come and go. People do a one-time contribution and then you never hear from them again. People work on a project for years and then just go silent. Honestly, credit where credit is due, but how is a project like this supposed to manage this?
Without a valid CLA and a strong core team, you often end up with fragmentation or legal deadlock. Even the ASF isn't a silver bullet—projects without strong leadership die there all the time.
The CLA exists to prevent that friction.
MinIO had a de facto CLA. MinIO required contributors to license their code to the project maintainers (only) under Apache 2. Not as bad as copyright assignment, but still asymmetric (they can relicense for commercial use, but you only get AGPL).
https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/.github/PULL_REQU...
everfrustrated|2 months ago
regularfry|2 months ago
jen20|2 months ago
Whether you can or will sign one is a different matter (I will not).
stormking|2 months ago
PunchyHamster|2 months ago
You don't need assignment to the project if you are not planning to change project's license.
You do need assignment to the project if you need to ever rugpull the community and close the code
speedgoose|2 months ago
runiq|2 months ago
victormy|2 months ago
runiq|2 months ago
EgoIncarnate|2 months ago
yencabulator|2 months ago
The number of weird incompetent things the Minio people have done is surprisingly high.