The CLA protects users of the software from contributors coming back later and saying: "Hey I own that code and now you need to pay me!" Apache projects in general rely on CLA documents.
It's totally in the right of the contributor to refuse to sign this document. But don't expect your contributions to be applied, or work on any Apache licensed projects :)
Agreed. They discuss this in the chubby paper as well.
There is a grace period where the master is in jeopardy of failing over vs failing over straight away. I left this out for simplicity of the state machine but I pointed to the chubby paper as a true reference.
They also mention the fact that client and master clocks must advance no faster than a known constant factor.
bq. I also see Cassandra timeouts while writing with consistency ANY, yet are still somehow getting timeouts with this operation. That really screams to me that the cluster is truly messed up.
This was a issue with atomic batches and CL.ANY we've fixed since the test.