There's some obvious humor behind a pull request opened by dependabot that prompts the #CLA assistant to invite the bot to first sign the contributor license agreement.

But there's also a concerning thread. I've seen a lot of this CLA Assistant bullshit proliferate online lately.

In case I haven't already said it enough times, CLAs are awful and they deserve to die - not proliferate.

They impose an unrequired additional legal burden on top of the standard software license.

They often require voluntary unpaid contributors to offer free support on indefinite term for software that they aren't supposed to maintain.

They are part of the same problem as the proliferation of custom T&Cs on online services (private parties creating whatever arbitrary set of binding rules they want on top of the standard law, assuming that they're so important that people are ok to waste half of their lives reading their legalese bullshit).

The difference is that, whilst there's no golden standard for a universal T&Cs that applies to all online services, we have one for software licenses.

That's the GPL, MIT, BSD or whatever license that basically every FOSS project slapts in their LICENSE.txt.

So, please, just stick to your LICENSE.txt, let your contributors stick to the basic common-sense rules written your CONTRIBUTING.md, and reserve a spot for CLAs in the graveyard of awful tech ideas that nobody should mourn.

https://github.com/dosyago/BrowserBoxPro/pull/289