Contributing oddness.

[412andrewmortimer]

In the README.md it says:

Disclaimer: this is not an official Google product.

In the CONTRIBUTING.md it says:

Before we can use your code, you must sign the
Google Individual Contributor License Agreement
(CLA), which you can do online.

I fail to see the correlation in me having to sign the CLA if I want to contribute if this is not an official Google Product.

Care to explain? This seems really weird to me.

[412andrewmortimer]

Now I'm not a lawyer... But it seems that the statement in the README.md is erroneous. Unless I'm using some other definition of the word "copyright."

LICENSE.md

Copyright (c) 2016, Google Inc.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
"Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE
LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION
OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION
WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

[nex3]

The short answer is that Google says so.

The longer answer is that I wrote Dart Sass as a Google employee, which means Google owns the copyright. I went through Google's official open-sourcing process to put it up on GitHub, and part of that process involves declaring that the project is "unofficial" (which I believe indicates that it's maintained in my 20% time rather than having dedicated headcount). Another part involves ensuring that Google continues to own the copyright by asking for CLAs.

I'm not an expert on this, but maybe @willnorris can say more.

[willnorris]

The "not an official google product" is more about setting expectations for support and releases.

The CLA is required of all projects that Google is the custodian of (official or not); it's designed to protect both Google and the users of the project by ensuring that all contributed code is provided under the same terms.

[412andrewmortimer]

Ok. Thank you to the both of you for clarifying. Not knowing any of that it just seemed super off-putting. I guess, as you state, there is more to it.