&gt; I see your point now, but the steps are functionally equivalent.<p>No, you&#x27;re equivocating.  This part never happens in the CLA-free world: I send a patch in to somebody and they tell me to sign the CLA before accepting it.  Or: somebody <i>else</i> sends in to Microsoft some code I&#x27;ve written, and Microsoft tries to get in touch with me to sign the CLA.  (This has happened.  Not only is it not necessary, but the text of the CLA itself says it&#x27;s not necessary.  The developers of the project don&#x27;t even understand their own CLA.  This is not specific to Microsoft.  I wrote about cargo-culted CLAs when Swift was opened up[1].)<p>&gt; The specific terms, however are down to the author of CLAs, not inherent to CLAs themselves.<p>This isn&#x27;t remarkable; I don&#x27;t know why you chose to make a remark about it.  It&#x27;s fluff.  It doesn&#x27;t legitimize your (still uncorrected) comment, and it doesn&#x27;t delegitimize mine.  Superficially, though, it looks like it does.  I don&#x27;t like this.<p>&gt; The Apache and the Google CLAs are fine, for instance, and look roughly equivalent to the terms of MPL 2.0.<p>I&#x27;m not going to analyze them here, but let&#x27;s go with the &quot;equivalence&quot; stance.  The argument becomes, &quot;They&#x27;re equivalent to the terms that are already in the license, so there&#x27;s no need for them at all.&quot;  That is, there&#x27;s no reason <i>not</i> to accept the changes if the contributor never signs the CLA.<p>Of course, most of the time, the CLA isn&#x27;t equivalent, which is why you&#x27;re asked to sign it.<p>&gt; Can you point out which part you object to specifically? On a quick read I don&#x27;t see anything in here[1] that&#x27;s not the equivalent of licensing your code to a project under a major OS license with a patent grant (e.g. Apache 2.0).<p>To use Apache 2.0 as a specific example, I already wrote a comment about it.[2]  The CLA neuters the patent termination clause.  This leaves the &quot;beneficiary&quot; of the CLA open to sue anyone over patents with impunity while keeping the hands tied of those on the other end of litigation.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10669891" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10669891</a><p>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10896722" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10896722</a>