Comment by eproxus
3 months ago
Yeah, that page is horrendous and looks super sketchy. It looks like a very professional fishing attempt to get unsuspecting developers to download malware.
They have a lot of obviously fake quotes from non-existent people at positions that don’t even mention what company it is. The pictures are misgendered and even contain pictures of kids.
Feels like the whole page is AI generated.
They have a CLA that assigns copyright to them: https://github.com/rustfs/rustfs/blob/5b0a3a07645364d998e3f5...
So, arguably worse than MinIO.
The _only_ reason to require a CLA is because you expect to change the license in the future. RustFS has rug-pull written all over it.
Or to offer it under a commercial licence in parallel.
2 replies →
Obviously this is not the only reason - even the Free Software Foundation require IP assignment via a CLA.
Whether you can or will sign one is a different matter (I will not).
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?
You can have CLA without assigning copyright to the project.
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
You could pick a license and not plan to relicense later. Like Linux.
What do you mean by 'manage?' In your mind, what are you planning to do in the future that you need my full copyright as a change owner?
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.
Then it's not the CLA that ensures project survivability. It's the strong core team you mentioned.
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...
That's so weird. Your contribution is a derived work based on AGPL, so it must be AGPL...
The number of weird incompetent things the Minio people have done is surprisingly high.