Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 25, 2024 22:11 UTC (Thu) by philh (subscriber, #14797)
In reply to: Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system by khim
Parent article: Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

> They automatically assume jujutsu would fail just because of CLA and there would be some king of successor, for crying out loud!

> Sure, jujutsu may still easily fail, but that wouldn't happen because of CLA, that's for sure.

All other things being equal, having paid attention to the success or otherwise of projects for about 30 years, I'd say that there is a high enough correlation between failure and the presence of a corporate CLA for me to assume that any new project encumbered by such a thing is not even worth looking at, because it'll very likely be superseded, and any time I spend on getting familiar with it will have been wasted.

That's without taking into account the real problem with corporate-backed CLAs, which is that I don't have a pet lawyer who will explain for free to me what the implications of signing it might be, whereas the other party did use expensive lawyers to ensure that their interests are protected. That being the case, I'm not going to sign one of those.

That means that I'm looking at a thing that is labeled Open Source, Free Software, or whatever name doesn't make you foam at the mouth, but really isn't in any practical sense, because only people that are careless of their own interests are going to contribute to it, so it might as well be labeled "Look but don't touch!"

I'm not demanding that they change that.

I am however disappointed that nobody at Google seems to have noticed that CLAs are the kiss of death.

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Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 27, 2024 20:32 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

> All other things being equal, having paid attention to the success or otherwise of projects for about 30 years

Wow. Where may I find your study? How have you picked the projects, where is the list, what was the outcomes you recorded?

> I'd say that there is a high enough correlation between failure and the presence of a corporate CLA for me to assume that any new project encumbered by such a thing is not even worth looking at

So you are not using C or C++, docker or kubernetes, don't use smartphones and so on?

I suspect that you apply your avoidance of CLAs very selectively to reach that conclusion.

> I am however disappointed that nobody at Google seems to have noticed that CLAs are the kiss of death.

Because from Google side it's most definitely not “kiss of death” at all. Many projects that require CLAs are leaders in the appropriate areas and even if you count some projects which currently don't require CLAs (like gcc or LibreOffice) they asked for CLAs for years.

All Google-initiated projects require CLAs (be it Angular, Go or TensorFlow, whatever) and the same is true for the projects initiated in most other corporations, too. And they lose that requirement (if that ever happens) only when corporations involved ditch them or fork is happening.

It would be interesting to see truly unbiased study which picks projects without looking on CLA and then looks on their fate over the years, but since both you and Google are looking for vindication of their stance (Google would definitely consider CLAs of Android an important part of its success while you would probably show us how Upstart was replaced with SystemD)… and given the fact that there are so very few which failed or succeeded because of CLA… extending your conclusions on the whole set of software available is just silly.

Especially because “correlation does not imply causation”: you may say that Angular is no longer the most popular framework because CLA, but then why is it replaced with CLA-encumbered React, instead?

Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 28, 2024 15:02 UTC (Sun) by gioele (subscriber, #61675) [Link]

> > All other things being equal, having paid attention to the success or otherwise of projects for about 30 years
>
> Wow. Where may I find your study? How have you picked the projects, where is the list, what was the outcomes you recorded?

There are some numbers in:

Jonas Gamalielsson and Björn Lundell. 2017. On licensing and other conditions for contributing to widely used open source projects: an exploratory analysis. In Proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym '17). ACM.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3125433.3125456

Table 8 seems to hint at the fact that projects with CLAs and similar contributor agreements tend to be more successful (according to BlackDuck's metric =~ being used) than projects without CLA. Correlation is not causation. This success could be due to having an entity (business, foundation) paying the programmers in charge of the project, rather than due to the CLA itself.

That study did not investigate the effect of CLAs on the number and variety of contributors to a project. So perhaps projects with CLAs are widely used, but not frequently contributed to (and the minute the sponsor goes away the project is dead, regardless of its widespread usage). But asserting that would require another study.