Zlatan Todoric writes ("Re: opinions of snappy packages"):
> I forget about Canonical's CLA from time to time - but this solely
> should be a reason to not adopt it in Free software projects.I think that's up to the individual maintainer. If the maintainer is prepared to carry the CLA-less patches, even if that means diverging from upstream and perhaps eventually becoming a de-facto fork, then the CLA is not a practical problem for Debian's users and other contributors. Or to put it another way: normally, if you maintain something in Debian, you might well ask someone with a patch to take it up with upstream directly, and you might even decline to carry in Debian a patch that upstream have technical objections to. But if you maintain in Debian something with an obnoxious CLA, and the patch submitter does not want to sign the CLA, I think you're no longer entitled to refuse to apply the patch just because the patch can't go to the ultimate upstream. How much of a practical problem this is for the maintainers in Debian depends on what the package is, but I think it's a decision for the potential maintainers, whether they want to put in that effort. This is why I was not concerned about the CLA for upstart. The Debian maintainer for upstart was very clear that they would be happy to carry CLA-blocked-upstream patches indefinitely, and it was clear they would have had the resources to continue to do that. Does the prospective maintainer for Snappy commit to do the same ? Ian.
