CLA proliferation and the Island of Dr. Moreau



The community response to license proliferation over the last many years has been positive, and I am pleased to see that the majority of open source projects are choosing to select from a certain set of options (e.g., GPL, LGPL, AGPL, BSD, MIT, Apache 2) that are all well-understood by engineers and lawyers. As such, there is no time wasted interpreting their terms and a low-friction ecosystem is fully enabled.
Once a project adopts an open source license, it usually adopts the standard "inbound=outbound" model; a phrase coined by Richard Fontana. Fontana describes the inbound=outbound model as contributions that are understood to be licensed under the applicable outbound project license, making it easy for contributors to participate in projects without intimidation and red tape. This is a very simple model that dovetails well with a smart license choice detailed above.
Unfortunately, many open source projects have chosen not to adopt inbound=outbound and, instead, require some form of a contributor license agreement (CLA). CLAs vary in scope and purpose. A good description of CLAs and Developer Certificates of Origin (DCOs; discussed below) may be found in Ben Cotton's article "CLA vs. DCO: What's the difference?"
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