No wait, I know Oracle has a bad rep which is deserved, but TruffleRuby and GraalVM is truly open-source, not open-core. They actually did something great this time.
> You will need to sign the Oracle Contributor Agreement (using an online form) for us to able to review and merge your work.
Read my lips:
N. O.
Read the CLA. This is a trap, do not get yourself or your company caught in it. It is open-source for now, until it gets enough traction. Then the rug will be pulled, the code will be relicensed as well as any further development or contributions.
This is insane, I cannot believe anyone can read and understand this and not consider the abuses of power it allows:
> 2. With respect to any worldwide copyrights, or copyright applications and registrations, in your contribution:
> ...
> you agree that each of us can do all things in relation to your contribution as if each of us were the sole owners, and if one of us makes
a derivative work of your contribution, the one who makes the derivative work (or has it made) will be the sole owner of that derivative
work;
> you agree that you will not assert any moral rights in your contribution against us, our licensees or transferees;
> you agree that we may register a copyright in your contribution and exercise all ownership rights associated with it; and
> you agree that neither of us has any duty to consult with, obtain the consent of, pay or render an accounting to the other for any use or
distribution of your contribution.
I would go as far as to state that anyone who contributes any code to this works against open source (by helping out an obvious rugpull/embrace-extend-extinguish scheme that diverts adoption and contribution from cruby/jruby) and against their fellow developers (by working for free for Oracle).
For what it worth, in France so called moral rights are "innaliénables", so you legally can't get rid of them, and I wouldn't be surprised this holds in most Roman civil law countries (most countries in the world). Just like you can't decide to get rid of all your civil rights and become a slave of the nice company that promised to treat you well and free you of the hurdle to take decisions by yourself. So IANAL but this contract is not only ignominious but is actually trying to require authors to make promises that they can not legally make.
That's completely normal for cathedral-style open source development. The FSF themselves required copyright assignment (not just a CLA) if you wanted to contribute to GNU projects (e.g. GCC) for many years; several GNU projects still do.
You only need to sign the CLA if you want to contribute to upstream, you can maintain your own fork if you want, and the code that is open source today will always be open source. Frankly I'd say Oracle is less likely to close it up in a scramble to try to monetise their open-source assets than smaller companies like Redis Labs - Oracle has plenty of products and makes their money from consulting rather than from selling code directly.
How can you compare the FLA with Oracle's CLA??? From the FSFA:
> An FLA offers a special clause against this kind of situation, in order to protect the Free Software project against potentially malicious intentions of the Trustee. According to this provision, if the Trustee acts against the principles of Free Software, all granted rights and licences return to their original owners. That means that the Trustee will be effectively prevented from continuing any activity which is contrary to the principles of Free Software.
You can name a few more rugpulls made possible by contributor agreements that permitted blatant abuse of power, and Oracle is also not innocent in this. Off the top of my head I remember the VirtualBox extensions fiasco. Oracle changed the license then started sending bills to companies.
I don't know what the "FLA" or "FSFA" is (are they real things or is this an AI-generated comment?), but the FSF traditionally required copyright assignment, which gave them all the rights in Oracle's CLA and more.
A programme that seemingly only existed for one significant project, and is not open to new projects. Interesting, but hardly representative of the free software movement in general.
MySQL was forked and the fork is the defacto standard shipped by linux distros. To me the only MySQL that existed was the one by Sun, now MariaDB has completely succeeded it.
Do you see the licensing/distrubution clusterfuck with Java as a good example of open-source stewardship by Oracle? Which Java disto are you using?[1]
Do you see the Google v. Oracle Java API copyright case as a good example of open-source stewardship by Oracle?
You know what else is prudently (/s) stewarded by Oracle? ZFS. That is why it is still not a part of the Linux kernel. A company that is basically a meme with the amount of lawyers it imploys would easily find a safe way to allow integration into the Linux kernel if only they wanted to contribute.
The examples above show exactly why Oracle has a decidedly bad reputation. On top of that, their CLA enshrines their shit treatment of the open-source movement and their free slave labour^W^W^W open-source contributors.
> Do you see the Google v. Oracle Java API copyright case as a good example of open-source stewardship by Oracle?
100% YES, given the clusterfuck support of standard Java on Android.
It is no different from what Microsoft has made with J++ on Windows, and like they came up with .NET, Google came up with Kotlin migration, ironically they keep relying on the standard Java that they don't support, for InteliJ, Gradle, and everything else that powers Android SDK on the desktop.
Google could have avoided the lawsuit if they bought Sun, after torpedoing it with Android, they thought no one would buy the company and were safe from paying anyone, wrong call.
